Can someone explain exactly what J is doing. And also can you breakdown the functioning of arr[i][j]?

JavaScript
#1

Tell us what’s happening:

Your code so far


function multiplyAll(arr) {
var product = 1;
// Only change code below this line
for (var i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
  for (var j = 0; j < arr[i].length; j++) {
    product = product * arr[i][j];
  }
}
// Only change code above this line
return product;
}

// Modify values below to test your code
multiplyAll([[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6, 7]]);

Your browser information:

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.117 Safari/537.36.

Challenge: Nesting For Loops

Link to the challenge:
https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/javascript-algorithms-and-data-structures/basic-javascript/nesting-for-loops

#2

j represents the index of an element of one of the inner arrays contained in arr. For example, arr[1] references the inner array of [3, 4], so if you wanted to reference the 3 in the array, j would be 0.

var arr = [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6, 7]];
console.log(arr[1][0]); // displays 3
#3

Variables are simply a named representation of some value. Naming things is useful for writing readable code.

product = product * arr[i][j];

In the example you gave where the argument arr is [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6, 7]], let’s look at what happens in the first iteration of the loops (ie i and j both are 0) by evaluating from left to right.

The variable product is 1 so we get

product = 1 * arr[i][j]

The variable arr is [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6, 7]] so we get

product = 1 * [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6, 7]][i][j]

The variable i is 0 so we get

product = 1 * [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6, 7]][0][j]

Now we can reduce the [[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6, 7]][0] bit down to [1, 2] because that’s the value at the 0-index.

product = 1 * [1, 2][j]

The variable j is 0 so we get

product = 1 * [1, 2][0]

Again, the 0-index of [1, 2] is 1 so we can reduce that bit down

product = 1 * 1

Which is the same as

product = 1

Then j is incremented and the loops continue from there exactly as above.

1 Like
#4

This was incredibly helpful I really appreciate your very detailed explanation. Thank you very much.

#5

@tghk232 Glad I could help.

Here’s another visualization just in case it helps. When you have an array of arrays, it’s common to call it a 2-dimensional array, and as you might imagine, we can display it as a 2-dimensional table.

i↓j→| 0 | 1 | 2 |
================|
 0 || 1 | 2 |   |
----------------|
 1 || 3 | 4 |   |
----------------|
 2 || 5 | 6 | 7 |

Sometimes it’s easier to structure your JavaScript in this way for readability.

const arr = [
  [1, 2],
  [3, 4],
  [5, 6, 7],
];
1 Like
#6

i don’t understand how iteration works here, why j is incremented before i?
shouldn’t i be 1 in order to j be 1?

#7

The inner loop is:

for (var j = 0; j < arr[i].length; j++) {
  product = product * arr[i][j];
}

Which initializes j to 0, and runs until j is not less than arr[i].length.

#8

I think now i get it , thank you so much.

#9