When I run your studentSearch() program with one loop it tells me in the console, "cannot read property 'toLowerCase' of null". Should the methods be placed in another position? Also, is it not best practice to almost always use strict comparison operators such as in the case of your first conditional statement in order to avoid errors and bugs?

Jonathon Irizarry was this happening when you pressed cancel? If so you're right. I was being lazy and just dropped those methods onto the end of the prompt. bad developer :{

We should really be testing to see if search is not null too because, as you've found we can't assign the .toUpperCase() or .trim() methods to a null object. Fortunately it's not a big shift from what we already have.

Example

if(search && search !== "" && search !== "quit") {
    // And then we can assign our methods to search here
    search = search.toLowerCase().trim();

    // Or we can do it within the `for-loops` conditional
    if(student.name.toLowerCase() === search.toLowerCase().trim()){...}
}

Hey, thanks for the solution. I'm curious about the purpose of 'var i' inside of the studentSearch func?

Ali Adams unlike my use of count instead of students.length which offers performance improvements, this is just a convention.

Scope

In JavaScript all variables have function scope (unless they are declared in the global scope, then they have "global scope". So for that reason it's best to declare variables clearly at the beginning of their scope.

// Both scopeTestOne and scopeTestTwo will treat 'i' the same.

function scopeTestOne(){
    var i; // i is accessible anywhere within the function.
    for(i=0; i<5; ++i){
        // Your loop code...
    }
    console.log(i); // i => 4
}

function scopeTestTwo(){
    for(var i=0; i<5; ++i){
        // Your loop code...
    }
    // i is still accessible anywhere within the function.
    console.log(i); // i => 4
}

Note in the above studentSearch() function we could have declared var i through to var count immediately, alongside our search variable declaration. But since there was a chance we would not need them I prefer to delay their declaration until we step into the first if block and know we need them.

Block level scope and let

In ECMAScript 2015 [ES6] we have the let keyword. Unlike var, let has block level scope.

function scopeTestThree(){
    let i; // has function wide scope.
    for(i=0; i<5; ++i){
        // Your loop code...
    }
    console.log(i); // i => 4
}

function scopeTestFour(){
    for(let i=0; i<5; ++i){
        console.log(i); // i => 0...4
    }
    console.log(i); // Uncaught ReferenceError: i is not defined
}

function scopeTestFive(){
    let i; // has function wide scope
    for(let i=0; i<5; ++i){
        // This i takes precedence over the first one.
        // But only lives within this for block.
        console.log(i); // i => 0...4
    }
    console.log(i); // undefined
    // Because it's the function wide scoped `i`, but we never assigned it a value.
}

The code is the exact same one he posted ("single loop") and was not modified. I'm just looking for some clarification on why when I run it in the browser I get an error in my Javascript console that says: Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'toLowerCase' of null at studentSearch (students_report.js:3) at students_report.js:24

I was tired when I posted the question and left out the part of the program that was not functioning correctly (hitting cancel). Sam has answered my question and cleared my brain, thank Lord. Thanks for your attempt at helping!