Question

I am trying to create a form that takes only a single letter and finds its position in an array (which is essentially the alphabet).

I wrote some this simple code:

var alphabet = ["a","b","c","d","e","f","g","h","i","j","k","l","m","n","o","p","q","r","s","t","u","v","w","x","y","z"];
var letter = "h";
var letterPosition = alphabet.indexOf(letter);

document.write(letterPosition);

to demonstrate the basic function. However, I am not sure how to put this into a function get and make the var letter equal to the value in the form’s input.

I want this to return the location in the array so that I can write a loop (inside an if/else)that will print all values in the array that come after the input value.

Answer 1

Try: alphabet[alphabet.indexOf(letter)] or in your code alphabet[letterPosition]

Concerning the loop you mentioned: with that value you can use the slice method to give you a subset of remaining characters from the alphabet array (ergo: no need for a loop to determine the remainder of elements from your array):

var subset = alphabet.slice(indexOf([a letter]));

And just to save you some typing: you could also declare your alphabet array like this:

var alphabet 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'.split('');