Question

Very simple thing I am trying to do in JS (assign the values of one array to another), but somehow the array bar‘s value doesn’t seem affected at all.

The first thing I tried, of course, was simply bar = ar; — didn’t work, so I tried manually looping through… still doesn’t work.

I don’t grok the quirks of Javascript! Please help!!

var ar=["apple","banana","canaple"];
var bar;

for(i=0;i<ar.length;i++){
    bar[i]=ar[i];
}
alert(ar[1]);

And, here is the fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/vGycZ/

---

(The above is a simplification. The actual array is multidimensional.)

Answer 1

Your code isn’t working because you are not initializing bar:

var bar = [];

You also forgot to declare your i variable, which can be problematic, for example if the code is inside a function, i will end up being a global variable (always use var :).

But, you can avoid the loop, simply by using the slice method to create a copy of your first array:

var arr = ["apple","banana","canaple"];
var bar = arr.slice();