Question

I have an array with objects id’s:

one
two
there
etc..

And i have quite a long object list:

<div id="container">
  <input type="text" id="one" />
  <input type="text" id="two" />
  <input type="text" id="three" />
</div>

This is not the actual html code, just a simplified version.

Now my array with id’s keeps changing, and my question would be
how can i find out which element from that array is the first element in #container div

For example if i have this order:

{
  email 
  name
  date
}

And this list of html objects

<div id="container">
  <input type="text" id="name" />
  <input type="text" id="last_name" />
  <input type="text" id="email" />
  <input type="text" id="date" />
</div>

name would be first, but in that array in some cases name item won’t exist so it won’t always be the name, i hope this makes any sense 🙂

Answer 1

If you want to sync your array order with the document order, you could do this:

<div id="container">
  <input type="text" id="name" />
  <input type="text" id="last_name" />
  <input type="text" id="email" />
  <input type="text" id="date" />
</div>​

JS:

var arr = ["email", "name", "date"];
var elems = $("#" + arr.join(", #") );


arr = $.map($.unique(elems.get()), function(v,i) {
    return v.id;
});

console.log(arr);
//["name", "email", "date"] ​​​​​​ same order as they are in the document

http://jsfiddle.net/KKz9U/1/

The $.unique sorts the elements to the same order as they are in the document