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I am trying to code a bot that can play hangman. I have used an array to store all the previous letter guesses. How can I add to this array, so that all previous guesses are shown in the console?

I have already tried using the push() function in JavaScript, and this seems to work fine for the first guess. But a second guess returns another array, which contains only that letter, instead of an array containing all guesses.

This also happens when I try to write the array using correctGuessed[correctGuessed.length] = guessVal; and I am not sure where I am going wrong. 

    var word = "ALPHABET";
    var wordLength = word.length;
    var choices = ["A", "B", "C", "D", "E", "F", "G", "H", "I", "J", "K", 
                   "L", "M", "N", "O", "P", "Q", "R", "S", "T", "U", "V", 
                   "W", "X", "Y", "Z"];

    var correctGuessed = correctGuessed || []; 
    var guess = Math.floor(Math.random() * choices.length);
    var guessVal = choices[guess].valueOf();

    //Start the game with a word length and a letter guess
    message.reply("I am thinking of a " + wordLength + " letter word.");
    message.channel.send("My guess is " + guessVal);

    //If the guess was correct
    if(word.includes(guessVal))
    {
        //Send a congratulatory message and push the letter onto
        //the end of the array so it cannot be guessed again. 
        message.channel.send("Your guess was correct! Guess again!");
        //newCorrect = correctGuessed.push(guessVal);
        correctGuessed[correctGuessed.length] = guessVal;
        console.log(correctGuessed);
    }

The expected outcome of this code is that if I guess the letter 'A', the console will display the result ['A']. Then, after guessing, say, the letter 'B', the console will display the result ['A', 'B'].

The actual output of this code is ['A'] after guessing 'A', and after guessing 'B', the output is ['B'] rather than ['A', 'B']. I am getting each guess in its own array.

The problem is not that I don't understand how push() works; I understand that 

var array = [1,2,3];
array.push(4);

will produce [1,2,3,4], but I am trying to achieve this, and it is not working.

user83024
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  • Possible duplicate of [Add to Array jQuery](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5861859/add-to-array-jquery) – McAden Feb 13 '19 at 15:47
  • @McAden I looked at that, and it explains how the method works, but I know how it works. I just can't get it to do what I expect. – user83024 Feb 13 '19 at 16:38

1 Answers1

1

The push() function of arrays appends an item at the end of an array. E.g.:

var array = [1,2,3];
array.push(4);
console.log(array)
// [1,2,3,4]

It is possible that you are declaring the array multiple times. If the code you are showing is inside a function, every time you call the function a completely new array will be created, when you do

var correctGuessed = correctGuessed || [];

To solve this, you could declare correctGuessed as a global variable, by declaring it outside of any function

Matias Demare
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  • I am using the ``discord.js`` library, and all the code must be inside the ``async()`` function, so declaring those variables outside of ``async()`` will [roduce an error. – user83024 Feb 13 '19 at 18:47
  • @user83024 `correctGuessed.push(guessVal);` is the right code. If that's not working then it's as this answer states - your array is going out of scope and being reinitialized as a fresh array each time. – McAden Feb 13 '19 at 22:56