Question

I’m trying to work out how to make this counter work. After a certain amount of animations have played, I want to make the page refresh. I know my code sucks. I’m not educated in this and I’m very new, not to mention it being difficult to concentrate (to say the least) where I’m staying at the moment… so be nice. Here it is:

$(document).ready(function () {
    function loop() {
        var p = 0;
        if (p = 3) {
            location.reload(true);
        } else {
            $("#p3").delay("1000").fadeIn("slow");
            $("#p3").delay("1000").fadeOut("slow", loop);
            p + 1;
        };
        loop();
    });

Answer 1

Your if (p = 3) statement is using the assignment operator = instead of the comparison operator === or ==. So p gets assigned to 3, the result of which is truthy, so the else statement is never executed.

Also your p variable is declared inside your loop() function, so it gets reset every time the function is called – you could move that declaration to just before the function (keep it inside the document ready handler: no need to make it global).

Also the line p + 1; doesn’t do anything: it doesn’t increment p because you’d need to assign the result back to p with p = p + 1, the shorthand for which is p += 1 or just p++.

Finally, your code as posted has a syntax error: you are missing the closing } from the loop() function. I would guess the intention is to end the function and then call it, so:

$(document).ready(function () {
    var p = 0;  // <--- moved outside function
    function loop() {
        if (p === 3) {   // <-- changed = to ===
            location.reload(true);
        } else {
            $("#p3").delay("1000").fadeIn("slow");
            $("#p3").delay("1000").fadeOut("slow", loop);
            p++; // <-- changed from p + 1
        };
    } // <--- this is the missing bracket
    loop();
});