Suboptimal wording for JS: Find the Length of a String

One of my students got stuck on this exercise, but it turned out to be a spoken language issue, not one of programming.

Use the .length property to count the number of characters in the lastName variable and assign it to lastNameLength.

They understood the task as being to find the length of lastName, but then to still assign lastName itself to lastNameLength. So exactly the pedantry we want to teach, uncovering undefined behaviour. 😃

I suggest changing the text to be more explicit:

Use the .length property to count the number of characters in the lastName variable, then assign that length to lastNameLength.

Affected page

https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/javascript-algorithms-and-data-structures/basic-javascript/find-the-length-of-a-string

[lynxlynxlynx]

Keep in mind, it might be obvious to us who have experience and great or native English proficiency, which was not true in this case (let’s say B2 for language and almost zero programming experience). After spending over 15 minutes on something like this, frustrated why the test is failing, I doubt anyone would remember how the original seed looked like. The instructions can be legitimately read so that lastNameLength = lastName is the expected solution. Hence the suggestion for change (though I’m not married to particular wording).

[jeremylt]

Or here’s a similar wording:

Use the .length property to set lastNameLength to the number of characters in last Name

I like this one if we’re going to change it.