Lesson Not Intuitive

Contributors
#1

In the lesson Basic Data Structures: Iterate Through the Keys of an Object with a for…in Statement, I have a suggestion to make a portion of it more intuitive. I got confused upon the first reading and attempting of the challenge.

The issue concerns this snippet of code in particular:

for (let user in users) {
  console.log(user);
};

It’s not intuitive that user is referring to a string, and not to another object. It’s not explained very well in the lesson text.

I think that if it were made explicit that user was referring to a string, it would lead to less confusion. Students would recognize that they couldn’t just access something like user.someProperty, and would have to access the parent object like parentObject.user.someProperty.

#2

“Sometimes you may need to iterate through all the keys within an object.”

An object key is always a string.

1 Like
#3

Ok thanks for the clarification. I don’t remember if this was made explicit in the earlier sections on Objects.

#4

It was in the first lesson on objects, which I know several challenges ago and I’m sure that your brain is crammed full of new material.

In this example, all the properties are stored as strings, such as - "name" , "legs" , and "tails" . However, you can also use numbers as properties. You can even omit the quotes for single-word string properties…

However, if your object has any non-string properties, JavaScript will automatically typecast them as strings.

1 Like
#5