solidity - check bignumber returned from solidity

Question

I am using truffle, but that shouldn't make any difference here...

When using contract's transfer mehtod, I want to pass a parameter - 1000000000000000000000000, but since this is too big, it results in an error. That's why I pass web3.utils.toBN('1000000000000000000000000')

After that, I should check if one of the address in solidity holds this amount of tokens.

So I have this:

let balance = await instance.balanceOf(address);

This returns a bigNumber.

Way 1: To get an actual number so that I can test if it worked, I tried this: balance.toNumber() which didn't work.

Way 2: Then, I tried assert.equal(balance, web3.utils.toBN('1000000000000000000000000'));, but now, it shows an error - AssertionError: expected <BN: d3c21bcecceda1000000> to equal <BN: d3c21bcecceda1000000> even though they still seem equal.

My question would be what way do you choose to work with such cases ? Way 1 or Way 2? and if so, how do I fix my issue then ? Thanks..

Answer 1

Whenever you need to display the balance just do balance.toString(). If you need to do some mathematical operations you can do them while variable balance is still a BigNumber, then after you can display the outcome again with .toString().