Question

I’m keeping track of things in an array currently, but I don’t need to know anything about them other than they’re in the array. For example, I might have a forSale array, and I have all the itemIDs that are for sale in the array.

Works fine for now, but anyways, I’ve been doing some testing and it seems as if object.hasOwnProperty(x) blows array.indexOf(x) !== -1 out of the water (I know they’re completely different but I don’t know of any other way to test if an array has a value in it). This got me to thinking, why not just create something like

var saleObject = {
    "someId" : "",
    "someOtherId" : ""
};

I can then call saleObject.hasOwnProperty('someId') and know that that object is on sale. I can see no downsides to this, but that’s why I’m here. Is there anything wrong in doing this?

Answer 1

No problem with it at all assuming you can modify the dependent code to accept the new structure. The difference in speed stems from the Object being able to do a Binary Search to determine whether it’s got the key, whereas the indexOf has to check every value in the array.