Question

I understand the JS .sort() function well enough, and I have a loose grasp on multidimensional arrays, but I’m a little stuck. Here’s what I’ve got:

var player1 = ["bob", 20];
var player2 = ["jon", 40];
var player3 = ["tim", 10];
var scores = [player1[1], player2[1], player3[1]];

scores.sort(sortfunc);

function sortfunc(a,b){
  return a - b;
}

alert(scores);

Obviously this sorts the scores correctly, but what I want is to order the player names appropriately in the alert() based on their score, e.g. tim, bob, jon. I’m not necessarily looking for someone to post the answer straight-up, but a little hint in the right direction wouldn’t hurt!

Also, is there a better (i.e. cleaner, simpler, what have you) way of doing this with jQuery? I know it doesn’t particularly matter, but I’m just wondering what it would look like in jQuery, too.

Thank you for reading.

Answer 1

Pass in the whole array in scores and your sortFunc extract the first element:

http://jsfiddle.net/PS2wS/

var player1 = ["bob", 20];
var player2 = ["jon", 40];
var player3 = ["tim", 10];
var scores = [player1, player2, player3];

scores.sort(sortfunc);

function sortfunc(a,b){
  return a[1] - b[1];
}