How do I convert a string to an object

Question

I'm new to programming and I wanted to develop my skills by working on a small project.

I am creating a Sudoku app, using HTML/JavaScript. I have a large number (81) of 'div' elements in HTML, and I want to assign content to them using by changing their innerHTML. Using the two for loops, I go through all 81 variables and re-create their name in 'x', which I then pass to assign_cell() to assemble the code.

puzzle_inc holds the puzzle itself (9..47.8.2..821.. etc; "." denotes empty cell), and I use a counter function to go through its characters one by one, assigning them to each 'div'.

After much testing and searching, I found out that my problem is that x is of 'string' type and the code in assign_cell() will not work. In this case, x will always be equal to something like "c01".

What I've been trying to do is to convert x to an object type. I have tried using JSON.parse() to fix the issue but probably due to my lack of knowledge in the field I have been unsuccessful.

I'm not sure how else to approach this but any help would be really appreciated.

Thank you.

function assign_cell(flag, arr1, arr2) {
    if(flag === 1) {
        arr1.innerHTML = puzzle_inc[arr2];
    } else if(flag === 2) {
        arr1.innerHTML = null;
    } else {
        alert("Error in function assign_cell()");
    }   
}

for(var i = 0; i < 9; i++){
    for(var k = 0; k < 9; k++){
        var a = counter();
        var x = "c"+i+k;
        if(puzzle_inc[a] != '.') {
            assign_cell(1, x, a);
        } else {
            assign_cell(2, x, a);
        }
    }
}

EDIT: I've been asked for the whole code, to better help answer my question. Please find it below. Thank you for the answers!

PHP JS

Answer 1

have you tried eval()

var stringval='[1,2,3]';
var value=eval(stringval);
console.log(value);//=>[1, 2, 3]