Hi everyone. On the challenge, Iterate Through an Array with a For Loop, there is a paragraph that says, “Remember that Arrays have zero-based numbering, which means the last index of the array is length - 1. Our condition for this loop is i < arr.length, which stops when i is at length - 1.” I don’t understand it. Could someone explain it to me? Thanks.
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What part don’t you understand?
Arrays are indexed starting at 0.
var exampleArray = [ 'a', 'b', c'];
In this example 'a' is the value at index 0. The length of this example array is 3. The index of the last item is 2.
< means “less than” so a loop with i < arr.length will only continue while i is less than the length of arr.
@IAScoding1
Yes, tricky at first but you get used to it. Length is not zero based, but arrays are zero based.
Using the above example:
var exampleArray = [ 'a', 'b', c'];
exampleArray[0] is 'a’
exexampleArray[1] is 'b’
exampleArray[2] is 'c’
exampleArray[3] is ‘d’
but with the four elements:
exampleArray.length is 4
You can see if you use the length as an index there is a problem, there is no exampleArray[4], hence you will always be using .length - 1 to define the last element in the array.
Does that make sense? This is is the convention and avoids the confusion of length zero holding one element.
-WWC
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The part I don’t understand is that the last index of the array is length - 1. Wouldn’t the last index of the array be length 5?
.length() gives us the number of elements in an array.
var arr1 = ['a', 'b', 'c']; // length is 3
var arr2 = ['lions', 'tigers', 'bears', 'OH MY!']; // length is 4
The last element of any array will have an index of one less than the length.
arr1[arr1.length -1] is equivalent to arr1[3 - 1] is equivalent to arr1[2] which is 'c'.
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Thank you. This helps.