Please explain why this works?

Tell us what’s happening:
I’ve just done the profile lookup and had trouble figuring out the code, and then by chance i moved the
return "no such contact";
and now it works. and I don’t understand why moving it made it work. I have put a before example for the code at the bottom to help explain.

Your code so far


//Setup
var contacts = [
    {
        "firstName": "Akira",
        "lastName": "Laine",
        "number": "0543236543",
        "likes": ["Pizza", "Coding", "Brownie Points"]
    },
    {
        "firstName": "Harry",
        "lastName": "Potter",
        "number": "0994372684",
        "likes": ["Hogwarts", "Magic", "Hagrid"]
    },
    {
        "firstName": "Sherlock",
        "lastName": "Holmes",
        "number": "0487345643",
        "likes": ["Intriguing Cases", "Violin"]
    },
    {
        "firstName": "Kristian",
        "lastName": "Vos",
        "number": "unknown",
        "likes": ["JavaScript", "Gaming", "Foxes"]
    }
];


function lookUpProfile(name, prop){
// Only change code below this line

  for (var i = 0; i < contacts.length; i++) {
    if (contacts[i]["firstName"] === name) {
      if (contacts[i].hasOwnProperty(prop)) {
        return contacts[i][prop];
      } else return "No such property";
    } 
  }return "No such contact";


// Only change code above this line
}

// Change these values to test your function
lookUpProfile("Akira", "likes")

before

function lookUpProfile(name, prop){
// Only change code below this line

  for (var i = 0; i < contacts.length; i++) {
    if (contacts[i]["firstName"] === name) {
      if (contacts[i].hasOwnProperty(prop)) {
        return contacts[i][prop];
      } else return "No such property";
    } else return "No such contact";
  }

// Only change code above this line
}

Your browser information:

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/76.0.3809.132 Safari/537.36.

Link to the challenge:
https://learn.freecodecamp.org/javascript-algorithms-and-data-structures/basic-javascript/profile-lookup

It is not possible to know if a contact does not exist in the array of contacts, until you have iterated through the entire list of contacts.

2 Likes

Of course! It seems so obvious now that you’ve said that!! Thank you