jquery/javascript: arrays

Question

I am a begginer with Javascript/jQuery and I hope someone can help me with the following:

I have a simple form (7 questions; 3 radio buttons/answers per question - except for question 5 with 8 possible choices ) and based on the selected answers, when user clicks on 'view-advice' I want to display relevant advices (combination of 38 possible advices) below the form. I have given "a", "b", "c",... values to radio buttons and I am collecting them in an array. The part where the script alerts the array works ok. I can't figure out the part where I display the advices depending on the values in the array.

I'd appreciate your help! Thanks!

Here is the code:

var laArray = new Array();

$('.button-show-advice').click(function(){

    $(":radio:checked").each(function(i){
        laArray[i] = $(this).val();
        if (laArray == ["a","d","g","j","m","u"]) {
        $("#advice-container, #advice1, #advice2").show(); // something is wrong here :(
            };
    })
    alert(laArray) // testing to see if it works

})

Answer 1

Rather than test for equality, I think the better means is to check whether or not each of your values are in the array using the jQuery inArray function.

Granted, this is just the beginning of code. You could probably write a function to shore this up, like so.

function radioSelected(val) {
  return ($.inArray(val, laArray) != -1);
}

and adapt it to your existing script.

Answer 2

You cannot compare arrays this way you should probably either compare each element of the 2 arrays

function compare_array(array1,array2) {
    var i;
    for(i=0;i=array1.length;i++) {
        if(array1[i]==array2[i]) {
            return false;
        }
    }
    return true;
}

or serialize the array in a comparable form ( comma separated string for example )

function compare_array(array1,array2) {
     return array1.join(",")==array2.join(",");
}

Answer 3

Would be nice to see the HTML code. But I guess you want to do something like this:

---

var laArray = [];
var compareValues = function(arr1, arr2) {
  $(arr1).each(function(index, el) {
   if(el !== arr2[index]) {
     return false;
   }
  });
  return true;
};

$('.button-show-advice').click(function(){
    $(":radio:checked").each(function(i){
        laArray.push($(this).val());        
    });
   if(compareValues(laArray,["a","d","g","j","m","u"])) {
      $("#advice-container, #advice1, #advice2").show();
   }  
});

EDIT: updated the code, forgot the }); ...