Looping code - Learn web development | MDN

Hi, can you explain the fifth step, I couldn’t understand it.

This is the article link :point_down:

Let me try to give some explanations:
“After (contacts.length-1) iterations” means “When we enter the last iteration”. For example: Four contacts (contact.length: 4) need four iterations. Therefore contacts.length-1 is three. So “after three iterations” means we now enter the fourth and last iteration.
Now, if we are on our last iteration this means we haven’t found a match, yet. Otherwise we would have already left the loop because of the break statement. There are two possibilities:

  1. We find a match and break out of the loop
  2. We don’t find a match and need to write “Contact not found”

This sounds like we need to upgrade our if statement from 4.3. to an if...else statement, right? Inside the else part we set the paragraph text to “Contact not found”. Because we only want to set this text in the last iteration, we also need a if inside this else. In the end the structure looks something like this:

if(/* name is found */) {
  /* write text to paragraph */
  break;
} else if(/* it is the last iteration */) {
  /* write "Contact not found." to paragraph */ 
}

The last part of (5.) just means: “let the loop finish after we wrote ‘Contact not found.’ (no break needed)”.

I hope this clears it up a bit and didn’t make it more confusing :sweat_smile:
If you have any further questions, feel free to ask.

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That was perfect, thank you very much. :green_heart:
But it makes me greedy, to request an example for another paragraph, I really couldn’t understand her example. :innocent:

Paragraph link :point_down:

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Glad I could help :slightly_smiling_face:

First a small note to the difference between break and continue. As an analogy you could look at them as two brothers where break is the lazier one. Both leave work early on Tuesday (skip the rest of the current iteration), but brother continue will show up the next day (iteration) and work for the rest of the week (loop). Whereas brother break won’t show up for the rest of the week (exit the whole loop).

Now for the example: I think the hardest part to understand is (Math.floor(sqRoot) !== sqRoot). Math.floor rounds down every number to the next integer:

  • Math.floor(5.22) -> 5
  • Math.floor(5.99) -> 5
  • Math.floor(5) -> 5

As you can see only in the last example is the number we put in the same number that comes out. They are only the same, when we put in integers (e.g. 5, 13, 1), but always different when we put in decimal numbers (e.g. 1.43, 3.9, 15.1). So basically if (Math.floor(sqRoot) !== sqRoot) askes the question: “Is the variable sqRoot not an integer?” or “Is the variable sqRoot a decimal number?”.
In the example we only want to write down integers. So by using continue we skip the last line inside the loop and continue with the next number (iteration) when we see a decimal number.

One could rewrite this loop without continue:

for (let i = 1; i <= num; i++) {
  let sqRoot = Math.sqrt(i);
  if (Math.floor(sqRoot) === sqRoot) {
    para.textContent += i + ' ';
  }
}

Now the if statement asks: “Is sqRoot an integer?” If it is an integer, the number gets written down.

Have a nice day!

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I am really grateful, thank you very much.

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