Question

I’ve got an in page text search using JS, which is here:

$.fn.eoTextSearch = function(pat) {
    var out = []
    var textNodes = function(n) {
        if (!window['Node']) {
            window.Node = new Object();
            Node.ELEMENT_NODE = 1;
            Node.ATTRIBUTE_NODE = 2;
            Node.TEXT_NODE = 3;
            Node.CDATA_SECTION_NODE = 4;
            Node.ENTITY_REFERENCE_NODE = 5;
            Node.ENTITY_NODE = 6;
            Node.PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION_NODE = 7;
            Node.COMMENT_NODE = 8;
            Node.DOCUMENT_NODE = 9;
            Node.DOCUMENT_TYPE_NODE = 10;
            Node.DOCUMENT_FRAGMENT_NODE = 11;
            Node.NOTATION_NODE = 12;
        }
        if (n.nodeType == Node.TEXT_NODE) {
            var t = typeof pat == 'string' ?
            n.nodeValue.indexOf(pat) != -1 :
            pat.test(n.nodeValue);
            if (t) {
                out.push(n.parentNode)
            }
        }
        else {
            $.each(n.childNodes, function(a, b) {
                textNodes(b)
            })
        }
    }
    this.each(function() {
        textNodes(this)
    })
    return out
};

And I’ve got the ability to hide columns and rows in a table. When I submit a search and get the highlighted results, there would be in this case, the array length of the text nodes found would be 6, but there would only be 3 highlighted on the page. When you output the array to the console you get this:

So you get the 3 tags which I was expecting, but you see that the array is actually consisting of a [span,undefined,span,undefined,undefined,span]. Thus giving me the length of 6.

<span>
<span>
<span>
[span, undefined, span, undefined, undefined, span]

I don’t know why it’s not stripping out all of the undefined text nodes when I do the check for them. Here’s what I’ve got for the function.

performTextSearch = function(currentObj){
    if($.trim(currentObj.val()).length > 0){
        var n = $("body").eoTextSearch($.trim(currentObj.val())),
            recordTitle = "matches",
            arrayRecheck = new Array(),
            genericElemArray = new Array()
        if(n.length == 1){
            recordTitle = "match"
        }

        //check to see if we need to do a recount on the array length. 
        //if it's more than 0, then they're doing a compare and we need to strip out all of the text nodes that don't have a visible parent.
        if($(".rows:checked").length > 0){
            $.each(n,function(i,currElem){
                if($(currElem).length != 0 && typeof currElem != 'undefined'){
                    if($(currElem).closest("tr").is(":visible") || $(currElem).is(":visible")){
                        //remove the element from the array
                        console.log(currElem)
                        arrayRecheck[i] = currElem
                    }
                }
            })
        }
        if(arrayRecheck.length > 0){
            genericElemArray.push(arrayRecheck)
            console.log(arrayRecheck)
        }
        else{
            genericElemArray.push(n)    
        }
        genericElemArray = genericElemArray[0]
        $("#recordCount").text(genericElemArray.length + " " +recordTitle)
        $(".searchResults").show()
        for(var i = 0; i < genericElemArray.length; ++i){ 
            void($(genericElemArray[i]).addClass("yellowBkgd").addClass("highLighted"))
        }   
    }
    else{
        $(".highLighted").css("background","none")  
    }           
}

If you look at the code below “//check to see if we need to do a recount on the array length. “, you’ll see where I’m stripping out the text nodes based off of the display and whether or not the object is defined. I’m checking the length instead of undefined because the typeof == undefined wasn’t working at all for some reason. Apparently, things are still slipping by though.

Any idea why I’m still getting undefined objects in the array?

My apologies for such a big post!

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Found the answer in another post.

Remove empty elements from an array in Javascript

Ended up using the answer’s second option and it worked alright.