Question

I’m sure there must be a really simple answer to this, but at the risk of sounding stupid- I can’t get this switch statement to work. The input var, ‘status’ can be either ‘public’ or ‘draft’, and I can assure you it is only holding one of those two values as I have alerted it out at various stages, and anyway, the if statement here works. Take a look:

        function switch_status(status){
            if (status == 'public'){
                return false;
            } if (status == 'draft') {
                return true;
            }

^This works, but replacing the ‘if’ with this ‘switch’ statement below doesn’t work.

            switch(status){
            case 'public':
                return false;
            case 'draft':
                return true;
            }
        }

The first one to provide me with the inevitable embarrassingly simple answer wins my accolade!

EDIT: Here is my full code-

        $('.status').live('click',
                function(){
                    fullClass = $(this).attr('class');
                    id = fullClass.split(' ').slice(-1);
                    status = fullClass.split(' ').slice(-2,-1);
                    var newStatus = switch_status(status);
                    alert(newStatus);
            });

        function switch_status(status){
//              if (status == 'public'){
//                  return false;
//              } if (status == 'draft') {
//                  return true;
//              }

            switch(status){
                case 'public':
                    return false;
                case 'draft':
                    return true;
            }
        }

Answer 1

You’re passing status as an array of one string (the result of slice) rather than as just a string.

When you check equality between your array and your string, it appears that coercion is causing the equality check to work. But coercion doesn’t happen in a switch statement.

If I change

status = fullClass.split(' ').slice(-2,-1);

to

status = fullClass.split(' ').slice(-2,-1)[0];

then it works fine.