Why doesn't the code run this alert statement in the loop?

Question

var animals=["horse", "ox", "cow", "pig", "duck"];
var i = 0;
while (i < animals.length) {
  console.log(i);
  console.log(animals.slice(i, i + 1));
  if (animals.slice(i, i + 1) === "pig") {
    alert("Found it");
    break;
  }
 i++;
}

Edited by jason chan for formatting.

Answer 1 · 2015-10-22T08:02:11Z

October 22, 2015 8:02am

Hi Aaron,

So your code above looks like (or it did before Jason sorted out the formatting :-) )

var animals=["horse", "ox", "cow", "pig", "duck"]; 
var i = 0; 
while (i console.log(i); 
console.log(animals.slice(i, i + 1)); 
if (animals.slice(i, i + 1) === "pig") { 
  alert("Found it"); 
  break; 
} 
i++; 
}

To get it to run I changed it to

var animals=["horse", "ox", "cow", "pig", "duck"]; 
var i = 0; 
while (i < animals.length){
  console.log(i);
  console.log(animals.slice(i, i + 1));
  if (animals.slice(i, i + 1) == "pig") { 
    alert("Found it"); 
    break; 
  } 
  i++; 
}

Your while statement needed a condition that can be evaluated. So I checked i against the length of the animals array.

Then you were missing the opening { after the while statement.

Then lastly is the line "if (animals.slice(i, i + 1) === "pig")"'. slice creates a new array, so what it is actually evaluating to is 'Array [ "pig" ]', not just "pig". So when you then try and use the strict equality test (===) it is returning false, as 'Array [ "pig" ]' is not the same as "pig". Instead you can use the loose equality test (==), which will look at the content of the array and decide that it's close enough.

Hope that's helped.

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Aaron Selonke

Aaron Selonke

Why doesn't the code run this alert statement in the loop?

1 Answer

bothxp

bothxp