Tell us what’s happening:
I am struggling to understand why my code is giving me the last 2 elements of the array if no elements in the array meet the critera of the function. for instance this spectific example returns [0,4]. Am i doing something wrong? Also I do not understand why I need the second “return arr;” but if I do not have it in my code, dropElements([1, 2, 3, 4], function(n) {return n >= 3;}) returns nothing. I am very confused.
Your code so far
function dropElements(arr, func) {
// Drop them elements.
for(i=0;i<arr.length;i++){
if(func(arr[0])==false){
arr.shift();
}
else{
return arr;
}
}
return arr;
}
dropElements([1, 2, 0, 4], function(n) {return n > 7;});
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Link to the challenge:
https://www.freecodecamp.org/challenges/drop-it
firstly…
it is common to avoid modifying an array you are looping with.
What i mean by that is…
// you are looping by the reference of arr.length here
for(i=0;i<arr.length;i++){
...
// you modified the array somewhere inside the loop
arr.shift() // this will make the loop unstable and unpredictable.
...
Now i am going step through how operations are called from the code you posted when the program is running.
//[S0] : first call to the function
dropElements([1, 2, 0, 4], function(n) {return n > 7;});
//[S1] : 'i' is 0 and 'arr.length' is 4 here
for(i=0;i<arr.length;i++)
//[S2] : the statement below will return true
// arr[0] is 1 and calling func(1) will result false.
if(func(arr[0])==false)
//[S3] : the program will shift the arr now.
// arr will become [2,0,4]
arr.shift()
//[S4] : the program finished the first loop and rechecking the condition
// i is 1 and arr.length is 3 now
// the loop decided to continue because 1 > 3 is false
// arr[0] is 2 and func arr[0] will be false.
// if condition will return true here.
if(func(arr[0])==false)
//[S5] : the program will shift the arr now.
// arr will become [0,4]
arr.shift()
//[S6] : the program finished the second loop and rechecking the condition
// i is 2 and arr.length is 2 now and,
// the loop decided not to continue because 2 > 2 is false
// the program decided to end the loop and return the arr.
// this is the outer loop return
return arr;
// this is how the code returning [0,4] because arr is [0,4]
hope this program steps helps.
This helps so much. i just assumed that the arr.length function would be costant since it is a parameter of the for loop. I didnt realize that it would also change with the array. After setting the length to a variable before the for loop the code passed. Thanks for the help!