Silly Array question

[ryan_b83]

Hi I am not too good with Javascript but I had probably a simple question.

Say i have the following array:

arr[53] = "apples";
arr[27] = "oranges";
arr[38] = "lemons";

And I want to loop through each element of the array and get the key and the Value?

I would do:

for(i=0;i<arr.length;i++){
//How would i echo the key/value at this point?
}

Thanks!
Ryan

[Fotiman]

Note, you're using an indexed array, not an associative array. So you don't access the values in the array with a string "key", you access them with an integer "index".

In your example, you're going to have an array that contains at least 54 items (your highest index is 53, and JavaScript arrays are zero indexed). If you do something like this:

for( var i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) { 
 alert("arr[" + i + "] = " + arr[i]); 
} 

Then arr.length is going to be 54, i represents the index, and arr[i] will get the value. In this case, if you've only populated 3 values in the array, you're going to be looping through a bunch of 'undefined' values.

[ryan_b83]

If i only have 3 values (in this case i do) then yes there will be a whole bunch of undefined values and it would require an additional if statement in the loop to see if the variable is defined before preforming an action on the variable.

I did find another usefull method.

for(var i in arr) {
 alert(i+" is "+arr[i]);
}

[Fotiman]

Right, that will get only the items that you've defined. I almost posted that in my last post, but I wanted to stress the point that you're assigning values using a numeric index, so treating them as an associative array is probably not a good idea.

[ryan_b83]

Yea i guess it looks that way. Those ID's are actually primary key's in a database, and the current array only contains specific rows. So yes although they are integers, they still need to be associative.

Thanks,
Ryan

[Fotiman]

In that case, you're actually storing an "object" that has an id value and a string value. Perhaps something like this might better suit your needs:

var arr = [ 
  {id : 53, fruit: "apples"}, 
  {id : 27, fruit: "oranges"}, 
  {id : 38, fruit: "lemons"} 
]; 
for (var i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) { 
  alert(arr[i].fruit + " has an id of " + arr[i].id); 
} 

This treats the contents of the array as objects.