Question

i wrote jquery custom fn extension script to remove the given element in an array,
but it works unexpected way so i want to figure out how to make it do reference manipulation without using return reference way.

$.fn.removeElement=function(e){
    var l=this.length;
    while(l--){
        if(this[l]==e){
            console.log(this);
            this.splice(l,1);
            console.log(this);
            break;
}   }   }
var x=['a','b','c','d','e'];
console.log(x);
$(x).removeElement('c');
console.log(x);

result is like the below,

> ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e"]
> ["a", "b", "d", "e"]
> ["a", "b", "d", "e"]
> ["a", "b", "c", "d", "e"] //???

i expect [“a”, “b”, “d”, “e”] in the forth line.

p.s. i don’t want ‘return stuff’..

Answer 1

For one, this line of code:

if('object'==typeof(e))

is like this in your code example:

if('object'==typeof(3))

which is

if('object'=='number')

which will never match.

I would also ask why you’re trying to wrap a normal array in a jQuery object. It would be better to just use a method that operates on an array.

As a global function, you could do it like this:

function removeArrayElement(array, itemToRemove) {
    for (var i = 0; i < array.length; i++) {
        if (array[i] === itemToRemove) {
            array.splice(i, 1);
            break;
        }
    }
}

var x = ['a','b','c','d','e'];
removeArrayElement(x, 'c');

As a global method on the jQuery object, you could do it like this:

$.removeArrayElement = function(array, itemToRemove) {
    for (var i = 0; i < array.length; i++) {
        if (array[i] === itemToRemove) {
            array.splice(i, 1);
            break;
        }
    }
}

var x = ['a','b','c','d','e'];
$.removeArrayElement(x, 'c');

As a method on the Array object, you could do it like this:

Array.prototype.removeElement = function(itemToRemove) {
    for (var i = 0; i < this.length; i++) {
        if (this[i] === itemToRemove) {
            this.splice(i, 1);
            break;
        }
    }
}

var x = ['a','b','c','d','e'];
x.removeElement('c');

Working example of the prototype method here: http://jsfiddle.net/jfriend00/tEXWH/