Why do I have to return something after the for loop? & don't i have to check .hasOwnProperty== true?

[veronicarbulu]

Hi all -
I’m having a hard time understanding a couple of things on this exercise.
First issue: why do I have to return something after the for loop? I included my last return “No such contact” (it’s commented out) within the for loop–which made sense to me-- but it wouldn’t work unless I place it outside the loop. I’m going crazy here. Can someone explain it in plain english please?
Second issue: I understand using .hasOwnProperty returns a boolean, which is why I made it to check it is was true in order for the code to execute. However, I’ve seen the answer for this exercise and i noticed it didn’t include “== true” or “==false” why?

Thanks in advance for any and all guidance!

  **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 (name == contacts[i].firstName){
        if (contacts[i].hasOwnProperty(prop) == true){
        return contacts[i][prop];
        } else {
            return "No such property";
        }
    }
    /*else {
        return "No such contact";
    } */       
} 
return "No such contact";
// Only change code above this line
}

lookUpProfile("Kristian", "lastName");

  **Your browser information:**

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_14_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.106 Safari/537.36

Challenge: Profile Lookup

Link to the challenge:

freeCodeCamp.org

[JeremyLT]

The very first time your function executes a line with a return statement, the entire function halts. Inside of your loop, this means that the very first time you find a contact that does not have a first name that matches, your function runs the line

        return "No such contact";

and stops without checking any more contacts.

---

As far as your question with hasOwnProperty, adding == true is redundant.

myObject.hasOwnProperty(someProperty) 

will either return true or false. The comparison

someValue == true

returns either a true or false value. Why not just use the fact that hasOwnProperty() returns a boolean rather than calculating a boolean value from the boolean value it returns?

[veronicarbulu]

Thank you so much for this explanation. Now i can get why return should be placed last.
As for the .hasOwnProperty(), i thought that for this exercise the value needed to return true in order for the loop to work. I thought that if it returned false, the code was not going to execute.

P.S. Sorry for the delayed response!