UNB/ CS/ David Bremner/ teaching/ cs2613/ books/ mdn/ Reference/ Errors/ ""SyntaxError:

The JavaScript exception "identifier starts immediately after numeric literal" occurs when an identifier started with a digit. Identifiers can only start with a letter, underscore (_), or dollar sign ($).

Message

SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier after numeric literal (Edge)
SyntaxError: identifier starts immediately after numeric literal (Firefox)
SyntaxError: Unexpected number (Chrome)

Error type

SyntaxError

What went wrong?

The names of variables, called identifiers, conform to certain rules, which your code must adhere to!

A JavaScript identifier must start with a letter, underscore (_), or dollar sign ($). They can't start with a digit! Only subsequent characters can be digits (0-9).

Examples

Variable names starting with numeric literals

Variable names can't start with numbers in JavaScript. The following fails:

const 1life = "foo";
// SyntaxError: identifier starts immediately after numeric literal

const foo = 1life;
// SyntaxError: identifier starts immediately after numeric literal

alert(1.foo);
// SyntaxError: identifier starts immediately after numeric literal

You will need to rename your variable to avoid the leading number.

const life1 = "foo";
const foo = life1;

See also