Search jQuery

jQuery Forum

$.inArray has poor argument order

in Using jQuery • 11 years ago

I understand people have become fairly comfortable with inArray after a certain amount of time, but I feel there are more people who are used to indexOf.

With the current order of the parameters, people will be very confused while switching there code from indexOf to inArray.

This is the current replacement flow:

1. I take my arr.indexOf(val) and replace ".indexOf(" with ", "

2. I put "$.inArray(" before "arr"

3. I get angry when inArray returns -1, when it should return an index, and start over analyzing the situation.

Considering inArray is a browser compatible replacement of indexOf, this makes sense.

Alas, you have the order of arguments flipped. This wouldn't be an issue if a meaningful error was giving when the function was used incorrectly.

I understand you keep such defensive programming out of the library for performance purposes, however this brings up another solution to this additional problem.

I propose two ideas from this issue:

1. swap the order of $.inArray

2. have a defensive version of the jQuery library, which throws errors.

For number 2, I wonder if there is a way to automate this... maybe something like coffeescript could help.

jsclark

Re: $.inArray has poor argument order

11 years ago

I would agree that the argument order for $.inArray() is not ideal, but I can tell you right now that it's not going to be changed. It's really not much more than a minor annoyance, and changing it would break a lot of existing code, which is not acceptable. I know the core team is very wary of altering the API, especially after all of the problems that the .attr() -> .prop() change brought about.

As far as error reporting goes, I know I've seen a project on github that claims to examine code and validate proper use of the library. I can't recall the name, and I believe it was defunct by the time I saw it, as keeping it updated as new features were added to jQuery proved to be too big of a task. Anyway, point is, it's definitely possible, has been done in the past, and there may still be a working tool out there that would do what you're looking for.

Response title

Attachments

jQuery Forum

$.inArray has poor argument order

Re: $.inArray has poor argument order

Statistics

Tags

Actions