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I am wondering what's going on behind the scenes in for...in vs. for...of loops in JavaScript. I accidentally switched them up on two similar instances, where one worked and one didn't, and I'm trying to figure out why the one that worked worked while the one that didn't didn't.

The problems involved doing basic coding exercises, listing first all odd and then all even numbers of an array containing integers from 1-10 inclusive. Details of what I wrote are below.

For the first one, to list all odd numbers, I wrote:

let numbers = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
function displayOddNumbers() {
    for (num in numbers) {
        num % 2 != 0 ? console.log(num) : console.log();
    };
};

This worked, so I moved on with my life, not realizing I'd unwittingly used a for...in loop instead of a for...of loop, and went to the next exercise, which asked to list all even numbers from the same array. I wrote:

function displayEvenNumbers() {
    for (num in numbers) {
        num % 2 == 0 ? console.log(num) : console.log();
    };
};

This did not work; it listed 0,2,4,6,8. When I changed it to

function displayEvenNumbers() {
    for (num in numbers) {
        num % 2 != 0 ? console.log(numbers[num]) : console.log();
    };
};
then it worked.

But what's going on? I realize I should have used a for...of loop to iterate over arrays, but what is going on behind the scenes to allow this code to work sometimes, but not other times, seemingly counterintutively?

user53
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  • `in` iterates over keys, `of` iterates over values. – tkausl Apr 30 '23 at 22:54
  • Really they are never interchangeable. Even your first script that you claim "worked" did log [strings, not numbers](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27537677/is-javascript-array-index-a-string-or-an-integer). – Bergi Apr 30 '23 at 23:14
  • And using `numbers[num]` doesn't really fix it. [One should never use `for…in` enumerations on arrays!](https://stackoverflow.com/q/500504/1048572) – Bergi Apr 30 '23 at 23:16

1 Answers1

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for...of method loops over the value whereas for...in method loops over the key.

When it is an array, the key is basically 0...(n-1), where n is the length of the array. The reason why it works for your case is because the value of the value is very similar to the index, thus it looks like it is correct.

When you do the following:

let numbers = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
function displayOddNumbers() {
    for (num in numbers) {
        num % 2 != 0 ? console.log(num) : console.log();
    };
};

You are actually iterating from 0 to 9 (Which means you have an additional 0 at the front and has a missing 10 at the back, but since your detecting logic num % 2 equals to 0 for both of them, so it doesn't get printed and you didn't noticed it. In other words, for...in is working correctly as it should, but the similarity between the keys and values make you confused.

AngYC
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