Home/ Questions/Q 8442061
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-10T08:44:45+00:00

I’m learning javascript and can’t figure out the problem in my code below. I

  • 0

I’m learning javascript and can’t figure out the problem in my code below. I guess I misunderstand how arrays actually work.

The problem is that the alerted array is not actually sorted. I would be grateful for any insights on this:

Here is a ready jsFiddle.

HTML:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>
      Test 1
    </title>
    <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js" type=
    "text/javascript">
</script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div class="items">
      <ul>
        <li>
          <a href="#" id="1">Link 1</a>
        </li>
        <li>
          <a href="#" id="2">Link 2</a>
        </li>
        <li>
          <a href="#" id="3">Link 3</a>
        </li>
        <li>
          <a href="#" id="4">Link 4</a>
        </li>
      </ul>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

Javascript:

var clickedLinks = [];
var passedItems = [];


// Collect clicked link IDs into an array and pass the array as an argument to shoplist()
$('.items a').click(function () {

if (clickedLinks.indexOf(this.id) != -1) {
    var linkIndex = clickedLinks.indexOf(this.id);
    clickedLinks.splice(linkIndex, 1);
} else {
    clickedLinks.push(this.id);
}

shoplist(clickedLinks);

});


function shoplist(ids) {
    passedItems.push(ids.slice());
    alert(passedItems.sort());
}

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Click Link 2
  2. Click Link 1

Expected Result: 1, 2, 2

Actual Result: 2, 2, 1

Things I’ve tried:

function shoplist(ids) {
    passedItems.push(ids.slice());
    var newpi = passedItems.slice();
    alert(newpi.sort());
    }
Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You are adding an array, the result of ids.slice(), to another array. That’s why the sort doesn’t work as you expect. Use concat instead, if you want to add the contents of ids to the passedItems array:

    passedItems = passedItems.concat(ids);

    Also, instead of adding a string to the ids array, you should use .push(parseInt(this.id)) instead, and then use:

    passedItems.sort(function (a, b) {
  return a - b;
});
    • 0