Question

Say I have an array of objects similar to

[ {name:"value1", action:"U"}, {name:"text2", action:"d"} ]

with many more entries.

I want to look up a value in this, but with a snafu, Say I want to see if any of the words in the list is in the string “I want to look up value1” and return that index number. How might I approach this? This would be running in Node.JS if that matters.

Answer 1

As epascarello noted, just doing a simple for loop wrapped up in a function to get that index should do what you are looking for.

var a = [ {name:"value1", action:"U"}, {name:"text2", action:"d"} ];

function getIndex( query, arr ) {
    var reg = RegExp( query );

    for ( var i = 0, l = arr.length; i < l; i++ ) {
        var item = arr[i];
        if ( reg.test(item.name) ) return i;
    }
    return false;
}

var index = getIndex( 'text', a );

If you are looking for other ways to manipulate data, you may want to take a look at underscore.

EDIT: I looked at your initial question a bit incorrectly, also took note of @pimvdb escaping recommendation. This is probably more of what you want.

var a = [ {name:"value1", action:"U"}, {name:"text2", action:"d"} ];

function getIndex( query, arr ) {
    query = escape( query );
    for ( var i = 0, l = arr.length; i < l; i++ ) {
        var item = arr[i],
            reg = RegExp( escape(item.name) );
        if ( reg.test(query) ) return i;
    }
    return false;
}

var index = getIndex( 'I want to look up value1', a );