Javascript unexpected identifier error

Question

I'm getting an unexpected identifier error with this line of code: var player[data[x].split("|",1)] = data[x].split("|")[1];

The response data is in this format:

Mike Trout|0\nRyan Braun|0\n...

Here is the full JS function:

function updateChance(round, pickNumber)
{
    $.ajax({
            type: "GET",
            data: {round: round, pickNumber: pickNumber},
            url: "./lib/updatechance.php",
            dataType: "html",
            async: false,
            success: function(response) 
            {
                var data = response.split("\n");
                for (var x=0; data.length; x++)
                {
                    var player[data[x].split("|",1)] = data[x].split("|")[1];
                }

                for (var r = 1; r < $('#battersTable').rows.length; r++){
                    //do something with player

                }
            }
    });
}

Answer 1

Look what you did here

.split("|",1)  //wrong

and

.split("|")[1]  //right

another issue, you have var with the bracket notation, not going to happen.

var player[data[x].split("|",1)]  <-- var, should not be there

And the for loop is missing a check so that is going to run infinite.

for (var x=0; data.length; x++)  <-- data.length what?

Why are you splitting twice? Twice the effort, do it once

for (var x=0; x<data.length; x++) {
    var info = data[x].split("|");
    player[info[0]] = info[1];
}

If player is not defined globally, you will need to define it before the loop.

Answer 2

You can't access an object indexer in the same statement where you declare the variable. The split function also only takes a single argument and returns an indexable array. So this:

for (var x=0; data.length; x++) {
   var player[data[x].split("|",1)] = data[x].split("|")[1];
}

Should be:

var player = {};
for (var x=0; x < data.length; x++) {
   var value = data[x].split("|")[1];
   player[value] = value;
}

Also storing the result of the split operation in an intermediate variable, and fixing the loop syntax issues which would've caused the loop to crash at the end anyway, had the syntax error not prevented the code from running.

All in all, since you had quite a few syntax problems, I would recommend running your code through a linter such as jshint . It'll give you a detailed error report of the problems.

Answer 3

in

var player[data[x].split("|",1)] = data[x].split("|")[1];

the keyword var doesn't make sense. You need it only to declare a local variable, what follows here is instead just an assignment.

There are other issues (see other answers and comments) but this is actually the syntax error that the borwser is reporting.

Answer 4

I'm guessing you want to do this:

     var player = {};
     for (var x=0; data.length; x++) {
        var flds = data[x].split("|");
        player[flds[0]] = flds[1];
     }