Question

I have a function that I want to return true or false.

Inside the function I iterate through some elements on the page and check their values.

But if I put a return statement inside the iterator, it will return from the anonymous function right? (and not the outer function).

function someElementHasZeroValue() {
  $('.some-class').each(function(){
    if($(this).html() == '0'){
      return true;
    }
  });
  return false;
}

So this function always returns false no matter what.

What is the best way to do this? The solution below seems to work but it doesn’t seem very elegant.

function someElementHasZeroValue() {
  elements_found_with_zero_value = 0;
  $('.some-class').each(function(){
    if($(this).html() == '0'){
      elements_found_with_zero_value += 1;
    }
  });

  if(elements_found_with_zero_value > 0){
    return true;
  }else {
    return false;
  }
}

More generally, does anyone know why Javascript requires you to iterate through elements with an anonymous function as opposed to a normal iterator like most languages, or is there some way to do it I’m not aware of?

Answer 1

You are using jQuery, not pure Javascript. You could do a normal loop:

function someElementHasZeroValue() {
    var selection = $('.some-class');
    for (var i = 0; i < selection.length; i++) {
        if ($(selection[i]).html() === '0') {
            return true;
        }
    }
    return false;
}

---

Alternatively, you could do this in a more jQuery-like way:

function someElementHasZeroValue() {
    return $('.some-class').filter(function(){
        return $(this).html() === '0';
    }).length > 0;
}