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Accessing Arrays with Named Indexes


dgvirtual

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I was fiddling with „Accessing Arrays with Named Indexes“ section examples of the Javascript tutorial and run into a situation I cannot explain. 

In short, I create an array 'person', then add elements to the array by index, and then add a third element by name. According to the tutorial, this should convert the array to an object (see here: https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_mistakes.asp) . Instead, after this I can access the variable 'person' as both an array (with two elements) and an object (or rather, a person.age property of the object). typeof 'person' reports: object.

var person = [];
person[0] = "John";
person[1] = "Doe";
person["age"] = 46;

Here is a link to the full test: https://www.w3schools.com/code/tryit.asp?filename=GHWE7BWHX1GH

Could someone explain what is happening here?

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3 things to answer your questions

Arrays strictly only have numerical indexes.

Adding a string index converts the array to a generic object.

You can access an object's properties through square bracket [] method, just like an array.

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OK, thank you, I see that adding this code:

const entries = Object.entries(person)

document.getElementById("demo3").innerHTML =
"entries: " + entries;

to my post results in printing all the object properties and values on the screen.

The only thing that I cannot understand is why the `person.length` reports 2 when the length of the object is actually 3 (2 does not change if I comment out the line that ads the third property and converts the array to an object).

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