Multidimensional associative array

JavaScript
1

How can you create a multi dimensional array in javascript and grab the values without looping through them. I was thinking that maybe it would be something like this:


var arrGlossary = new Array();
arrGlossary["JavaScript"][0] = "JavaScript";
arrGlossary["JavaScript"][1] = "JavaScript is...";

arrGlossary["ColdFusion"][0] = "ColdFusion";
arrGlossary["ColdFusion"][1] = "ColdFusion is...";

arrGlossary["PHP"][0] = "PHP";
arrGlossary["PHP"][1] = "PHP is...";

This looks so wrong to me and I’m sorta lost here. What I was originally trying to do is glossary where all I need to do is access the glossary term and definition. I was thinking you could do this with a common key/value pair but I’m not sure if JavaScript can support it. I only want to grab the individual term/definition then later on loop out the rest.

Can a Javascript guru help me out here?

Thanks,
Tony.

2

Do you really need a multi-dimensional associative array, or is something like this what you are looking for:

var myObject = {"dog":"a four legged animal", "human":"a two legged animal", "whale": "a big thing that lives in the ocean"};

var word = "human";
alert("Accessing one word in the glossary--\
\
" + word + ": " + myObject["human"]);

var str = "";
var property;
for(property in myObject)
{
	str += property + ": " + myObject[property] + "\
";
}

alert("The whole glossary--\
\
" + str);
3

That’s pretty close to what I am looking for! Thanks!

I was just curious lets say I created a function that will grab the key/value pair based upon the term being passed so lets say that we had a function called:

showTermDefinition()

and we wanted to grab the human key/value pair how would we go about doing that?

so lets say the use of this function would be something like this:

showTermDefinition(“human”);

What would the code in the function be?


function showTermDefinition(term)
{
   alert("Accessing one word in the glossary--\
" + term": " + myObject[term]);
}
4

Here’s an example of a multi-dimensional “thing” that might work for you:

var myObject = {};
myObject.Javascript = ["jstext0", "jstext1", "jstext2"];  //creates a Javascript property for myObject, and assigns it an array
myObject.PHP = ["phptext0", "phptext1", "phptext2"];
myObject.ColdFusion = ["cftext0", "cftext1", "cftext2"];

var category = "PHP";
var index_num = 0;
alert(myObject[category][index_num]);


var property
for(property in myObject)
{
	for(var i = 0, len = myObject[property].length; i < len; i++)
	{
		alert(myObject[property][i]);
	}
}

If you want to access the array with words rather than the index values 0,1,2, then assign an object to the property instead of an array:

myObject.Javascript = {“keyword0”:“jstext0”, “keyword1”:“jstext1”, “keyword2”:“jstext2”};

5

so lets say the use of this function would be something like this:

showTermDefinition(“human”);

What would the code in the function be?

That should be readily apparent from the code I posted. Look at the ‘word’ variable and how it is used.

6

So I worked out my example above and it sorta worked. But How do I ouput the key of “human” on an idividual basis?

7

How do I ouput the key of “human” on an idividual basis?

Look at the output for the first example. When the whole glossary was displayed, were the keys displayed? How did the code display the keys?