Entry

How do I create an Array?

Jun 25th, 2002 16:43
Aaron Peterson, Martin Honnen, www.openproliferation.org/incor/ www.openproliferation.org/tutortools/

First note that Array objects were introduced in JavaScript1.1 so if 
you (which is rather seldom) happen to use NN2 or IE3 the following 
doesn't hold for you.
Otherwise the simpliest way for short arrays is usually to call the 
Array constructor and pass the array elements as arguments as in
  var a = new Array (0, 1, 2, 3, 4);
You can however first create an empty array 
  var a = new Array();
and then add elements
  a[0] = 0; a[1] = 1; a[2] = 2; a[3] = 3; a[4] = 4;
JavaScript1.2 (around since version 4 browsers) also introduced Array 
literals (similar to string literals e.g. 'string' or number literals 
e.g. 2) so you also write
  var a = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4]
to create an array meaning an array literal is just a list of array 
values contained in square brackets.
Lastly you might find
  var a = new Array (5);
which in that case creates a new Array of length 5 so if you pass only 
one numeric paramenter to new Array() that is taken as the Array length 
and not an Array element. But as Arrays can grow and shrink dynamically 
defining a length when creating an array is rather unimportant.

AP added links to his sites that use arrays extensively.
incor complex site works well,
tutortools is very fussy... the array code appears to work, but I have 
a lot of other bugs in it...