Question

In my application,I need to do some iteration with the array-like object.

So I write a custom util method:

Util.forEach=function(iterator,callback,context){
  if(iterator.length){
    for(var i=0;i<iterator.length;i++){
      var val=iterator[i];
      callback && callback.call(context||null,val,i);
    }
  }
}

Then I meet some problems:

Suppose I have an array: var ary=[1,2,3,4,5];

1. how to break the loop?

For example, if I want to find if value ‘2’ is included in the array,I may try this:

Util.forEach(ary,function(value,index){
  if(value==2){
    //find mached value,now I should break and return this value.

    //but I can not use 'break' in this context.
  }
});

2. remove value of the array when iterator

If I want to remove value ‘2’ of the array,I may try this:

Util.forEach(ary,function(value,index){
  if(value==2){
    //delete it.
    ary.splice(i,1);
    // I wonder if this is the safe way?
  }
});

Since in java we can not do this when iterate an array,it will cause the concurrency exception.

Though I run the above code without any error,but I am not sure if it is the best practice?

Answer 1

The first issue can be solved by checking the return value from the callback and stopping the iteration if it returns false. Then you can stop the iteration by returning false from the callback. Returning anything other than false (including returning nothing) will continue the iteration. jQuery uses this return value technique to cancel the iteration in their .each() iterator. Adding that into your code, it would look like this:

Util.forEach=function(iterator,callback,context){
    if (iterator.length && callback) {
        for(var i = 0; i < iterator.length; i++){
            var val=iterator[i];
            if (callback.call(context||window,val,i) === false) {
                break;
            }
        }
    }
}

In the MDN documentation for forEach, you can see a sample implementation.

On the second issue, this type of implementaation does not permit insertion or deletion of elements at or before the iteration point because that will cause some elements to get skipped in the iteration or some objects to get iterated multiple times. The obvious way around that would involve making a copy of the object before iterating which is not efficient when not needed.