If you’re a Web developer, you certainly want to make your user’s experience smoother. In the article about cache and WordPress plugins, we already mentioned that. For this goal, developers use some methods, libraries, APIs, and more. localStorage is one of these helpful methods. It lets user store data in their browser without creating a workload on the website server. In this article, we’ll learn what is localStorage, its methods, and its significance.
Table of Contents
What is localStorage in Javascript?
For those who don’t have time, in simple terms, localStorage lets you save data in your browser without an expiration time unlike a cookie or a sessionStorage. For further explanation, bear with me.
Characteristics of localStorage
- localStorage is a concept that belongs to Web Storage API.
- There’s no expiration date.
- It can be cleared through Javascript or clearing the browser cache.
- The keys and values that are stored in localStorage are in UTF-16 format which means every char is 2 bytes.
- localStorage returns different data for the corresponding protocol. The data shown in the HTTP and HTTPS versions of a website will not be the same.
Why localStorage is so Important for Javascript
In situations where we don’t want our values to be expired and be vanished from the universe, we can use localStorage. It’s handy because we can literally store anything we can store in cookies. Of course, we wouldn’t want to store sensitive information because it’s visible on the client side since it’s a Javascript method.
Methods of localStorage
There are 5 main methods of a localStorage. Those are: setItem, getItem, removeItem, clear, and key.
setItem Method
setItem is one of the most used localStorage methods with its best friend getItem. The purpose of this method is to add an item to localStorage to store data.
localStorage.setItem("name", "Ozan");getItem Method
getItem is used when we want to read the data stored in the browser by the setItem method.
localStorage.getItem("name");removeItem Method
removeItem is used when we want to delete a specific item from localStorage.
localStorage.removeItem("name");clear Method
clear is used when we want to delete all of the records in localStorage. Every single data in localStorage will be deleted afterward.
localStorage.clear();
key Method
If you want to get value through localStorage without using the key value, you can use key method alternatively. It requires an index as a parameter and returns the corresponding data.
let index = 0; localStorage.key(index);
Conclusion
Hope you learned what localStorage is and what are methods of localStorage. Stay tuned for upcoming articles!