How Search for a String in an array using javascript without using regular expressions

Question

I'm a newbie to Javascript please help me to solve my problem

function myFunction() {
var fr = ["banana", "orange", "apple", "mango"];
var n = fr.length;
var s = "a";
for(i=0;i<n;i++){
  if(fr[i].indexOf(s) != -1){
     console.log(fr[i]);          
  }
 }        
}

and the output im getting is

banana
orange
apple
mango

but what i want is that it should print only the word that starts with the given letter/word

i.e., : apple

Mritunjay · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-29 14:12:30Z

2

When you are checking index!=-1, that is basically you are checking that a is present anywhere in string.

If you want to check that string start with a you should check if a is at 0th index.

Check this in if condition

if(fr[i].indexOf(s) === 0)

This will give the expected output.

answered Aug 29, 2014 at 14:12

Mritunjay

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2 Comments

pankaj Over a year ago

perfect ! thank you so much friend :) you saved my life,i have been trying to solve this problem since 2 days.

Heejin Over a year ago

This solution will be slow if fr[i] is pretty long. FYI, the better way is stackoverflow.com/a/4579228/961314.

QuinnFTW · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-29 14:14:47Z

0

The reason that all of them are showing is because all of those strings contain the character 'a'. If you only want to show the strings that begin the the character 'a' Mritunjay's solution is the way to go

answered Aug 29, 2014 at 14:14

QuinnFTW

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Comments

patricmj · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-29 14:24:45Z

0

You can use substring. This example will give you the first letter in the string.

 if(fr[i].indexOf(s) != -1){
     if(fr[i].substring(1, 0) === "b")
     {
         console.log("b found");
     }
 }

edited Aug 29, 2014 at 14:24

answered Aug 29, 2014 at 14:19

patricmj

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Comments

KooiInc · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-30 06:58:16Z

0

(For the record) Case insensitive filtering of your array on /^a/i (see MDN)

["banana", "orange", "apple", "mango"]
  .filter( function (v) { return v[0].toLowerCase() === 'a'; } );

edited Aug 30, 2014 at 6:58

answered Aug 29, 2014 at 14:28

KooiInc

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