Question

In JS, I’m having trouble working out how to split a string coming from an AJAX call.

This is what I have so far:

xmlhttp.onreadystatechange = function()
{
if (xmlhttp.readyState==4 && xmlhttp.status==200)
{
feedUpdateResponse = xmlhttp.responseText;
/////...split script.../////
}
}
xmlhttp.open("GET","https://myDomain.com/myScript.aspx",true);
xmlhttp.send();

Where you have /////…split script…///// in my script above, I need to add a little function that splits the string returned from my AJAX call.

The string simply contains names of DIVs, like this:

feedUpdateResponse = "div1/div2/div3/div4"

I would like to first split the string by its slashes (/) and run a loop through the different values and do stuff to those elements on my page.

To give an idea of what I need to achieve, I have given this example which is a mix of ASP & JS – it’s the only way I can possibly describe it (and show that I’ve had an attempt) 🙂

MyArray = Split(feedUpdateResponse,"/")
For Each X In MyArray
documentGetElementById('updateAvailable_'+x).style.visibility="visible";
Next

On my page I have an ASP script that produces jquery carousels, all contained by separate DIVs. The DIVs are named DIV1, DIV2 etc. Inside DIV1, for example, is a text element called updateAvailable_div1 which will alert the user “There are new photos available for this feed, please click the refresh button”.

Could somebody please explain to me how I can change my example above to work in JS? Just need to split the string into an array and loop through the split values…

Answer 1

You can use .split() to split a string on a specified character with the results returned as an array. So then it’s just a matter of looping through the array:

// given your existing variable
// feedUpdateResponse = "div1/div2/div3/div4" as set in the
// code in the question, add this:

var a = feedUpdateResponse.split("/"),
    i;

for (i = 0; i < a.length; i++) {
    document.getElementById("updateAvailable_" + a[i]).style.visibility
                                                                 = "visible";
}