PHP in_array or array_search vs JavaScript includes or indexOf

In my previous post, I’d created a bug in my PHP code by improper use of PHP’s array_search function. If you only write PHP, this kind of thing will probably never happen to you. I also write Java and JavaScript code, and at some point, your memory banks overflow, and you forget stuff!

JavaScript has a couple of different methods for searching through an array to find an item. Let’s use the array method includes to search for an item in JavaScript, just like I did in my PHP example.

var foods = new Array();
foods.push('ice cream');
foods.push('hamburger');
foods.push('brussels sprouts');

var do_important_things = function() { console.log('Important!'); };

if (foods.includes('ice cream')) {
    do_important_things();
}
...

If you print out foods, you can verify that ‘ice cream’ is located at index 0. The code foods.includes('ice cream') returns true because that string is found in the array. No confusion there – a boolean is returned, not an index.

If I’m doing a more complicated comparison, I might use JavaScript’s some, like this:

if (foods.some(function(el) { return el.toLowerCase() === 'ice cream'; })) {
    do_important_things();
}

The some method loops over all elements in the array until the callback method returns true, at which point it stops, and returns true. If no item is found which satisfies the condition in the callback, then false is returned. Again, since a boolean is returned and not an index, there’s no room for error.

There’s a JavaScript method which is the equivalent of the PHP array_search function: indexOf. It returns the index of the matching item, if found, and otherwise returns -1. Here’s an example:

if (foods.indexOf('ice cream')) {
    do_important_things();
}

Oops, this method of searching exhibits the same bug as array_search in PHP! In my opinion, the indexOf JavaScript method is more appropriately named – it makes it clear that you are going to get an index as a return value. So it makes it less likely that the all-too-human developer will create the bug that I demonstrated in my previous post.

Now, when researching this topic, I found that PHP has a function that is more appropriate than array_search for my use case. It’s the in_array function. It returns TRUE if the item being sought is found in the input array. That’s really what I wanted! Here’s the example code that I used in my previous post, only now it uses in_array:

$foods = Array();
$foods[] = 'ice cream';
$foods[] = 'hamburger';
$foods[] = 'brussels sprouts';

function do_important_things() {
    echo 'Important!';
};

if (in_array('ice cream', $foods)) {
    do_important_things();
}

In this example, do_important_things is called.