Why does my array length always come out to 0 even though var email is equal to a string. (I've alerted out var email and the data is there).
var emails = new Array();
//get all the emails
$('.emailBox input').each(function (i)
{
var email = $(this).val();
if(email != '')
{
emails[email] = email;
alert(emails.length);
}
});
Because you're adding a property to the array.
var a = [];
a.foo = 42;
a.length === 0; // true
Instead try
emails.push(email);
This is the same as emails[emails.length] = email
As an aside:
var emails = new Array();
Is bad. You should be using [] instead of new Array() mainly because it's more terse and readable.
if (email != '') {
The above can be replace with if (email) { in case jQuery ever returns undefined or null
To make the entire code more elegant you should use
var emails = $('.emailBox input').map(function() {
return this.value;
}).filter(function (k, v) { return v; }).get();
Or without jQuery
var emails = [].map.call(document.querySelectorAll(".emailBox input"), function (v) {
return v.value;
}).filter(function (v) { return v; });
Although you'll need a QSA shim and a ES5 shim for legacy platform support.
Edit:
If you want the array to be unique then reduce it.
var arr = arr.reduce(function (memo, val, key, arr) {
// if the first index of the value is the index then add it.
// if the first index is different then we already have it.
if (arr.indexOf(val) === key) {
memo.push(val);
}
return memo;
}, []);
[] instead of new Array(), would you say the former is more readable (especially for a beginner)?
.map behaves similarly to ES5 rather then doing is this jQuery specific nonsense.map() working this way lets you easily modify the jQuery collection. It's slightly hacky to use it to return other data types and then toss a get() at the end.[].map.call(jQueryObj, mapper)emails[email] = email isn't doing what you want it to do. Try
emails.push(email);
null and undefined)