javascript: iterar en arrays

Use for-in correctly

You'll get people telling you to use for-in, but that's not what for-in is for. for-in loops through the enumerable properties of an object, not the indexes of an array.

Still, it can be useful, particularly for sparse arrays, if you use appropriate safeguards:

// `a` is a sparse array
var key;
var a = [];
a[0] = "a";
a[10] = "b";
a[10000] = "c";
for (key in a) {
    if (a.hasOwnProperty(key)  &&        // These are explained
        /^0$|^[1-9]\d*$/.test(key) &&    // and then hidden
        key <= 4294967294                // away below
        ) {
        console.log(a[key]);
    }
}

Note the two checks:

    That the object has its own property by that name (not one it inherits from its prototype), and

    That the key is a base-10 numeric string in its normal string form and its value is <= 2^32 - 2 (which is 4,294,967,294). Where does that number come from? It's part of the definition of an array index in the specification, §10.5. Other numbers (non-integers, negative numbers, numbers greater than 2^32 - 2, are not array indexes). The reason it's 2^32 - 2 is that that makes the greatest index value one lower than 2^32 - 1, which is the maximum value an array's length can have. (E.g., an array's length fits in a 32-bit unsigned integer.) (Props to RobG for pointing out in a comment on my blog post that my previous test wasn't quite right.)

That's a tiny bit of added overhead per loop iteration on most arrays, but if you have a sparse array, it can be a more efficient way to loop because it only loops for entries that actually exist. E.g., for the array above, we loop a total of three times (for keys "0", "10", and "10000"), not 10,001 times.

Now, you won't want to write that every time, so you might put this in your toolkit:

function arrayHasOwnIndex(array, prop) {
    return array.hasOwnProperty(prop) && /^0$|^[1-9]\d*$/.test(prop) && prop <= 4294967294; // 2^32 - 2
}

And then we'd use it like this:

for (key in a) {
    if (arrayHasOwnIndex(a, key)) {
        console.log(a[key]);
    }
}

Or if you're interested in just a "good enough for most cases" test, you could use this, but while it's close, it's not quite correct:

for (key in a) {
    // "Good enough" for most cases
    if (String(parseInt(key, 10)) === key && a.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
        console.log(a[key]);
    }
}