Question

I’m working on project in which I have to create a search engine through jQuery. Everything has been going great until I started looping through the array.

I don’t know whether I’m doing it wrong, but for some reason, when I use a conditional it does not output the statement I want it to say. If I change the conditional to say whether there’s something in the array output this, it does. But if the array is empty it does absolutely nothing. Why is that?

for(var i = 0, j = response.length; i < j; i++){ 
    var searchItemRes = response[i];
    if(response.length === 0){
        $('' + '<ul>' +
            '<li><span>Nothing found, try again</span></li>' +
            '</ul>'
        ).appendTo(searchResults);
    }
    $('' + '<ul>' +
        '<li><img src="" /><span> '+searchItemRes.title+'</span></li>' +
        '</ul>'
    ).appendTo(searchResults);
}

Answer 1

How can code that triggers on response.length == 0 ever execute inside a loop that iterates response.length times?

Perhaps you meant:

if (response.length === 0) {
    $('<ul><li><span>Nothing found; try again</span></li></ul>').appendTo(searchResults);
}
else {
    for (var i = 0, j = response.length; i < j; i++) { 
        var searchItemRes = response[i];

        $('<ul>' +
            '<li><img src="" /><span>' + searchItemRes.title + '</span></li>' +
            '</ul>'
        ).appendTo(searchResults);
    }
}