Looping through array and removing items, without breaking for loop

dzm picture dzm · Mar 27, 2012 · Viewed 272.6k times · Source

I have the following for loop, and when I use splice() to remove an item, I then get that 'seconds' is undefined. I could check if it's undefined, but I feel there's probably a more elegant way to do this. The desire is to simply delete an item and keep on going.

for (i = 0, len = Auction.auctions.length; i < len; i++) {
    auction = Auction.auctions[i];
    Auction.auctions[i]['seconds'] --;
    if (auction.seconds < 0) { 
        Auction.auctions.splice(i, 1);
    }           
}

Answer

user1106925 picture user1106925 · Mar 27, 2012

The array is being re-indexed when you do a .splice(), which means you'll skip over an index when one is removed, and your cached .length is obsolete.

To fix it, you'd either need to decrement i after a .splice(), or simply iterate in reverse...

var i = Auction.auctions.length
while (i--) {
    ...
    if (...) { 
        Auction.auctions.splice(i, 1);
    } 
}

This way the re-indexing doesn't affect the next item in the iteration, since the indexing affects only the items from the current point to the end of the Array, and the next item in the iteration is lower than the current point.