I'm completely stumped on the sort on page 298

JavaScript
1

I am deleting this entire original question because I accidentally hit the post instead of the save button that is so plain I missed it, and so all my edit was lost!

I figured out the one question but I am thinking the code below would get into an endless loop if two items to sort were equal because it never returns a 0 to alert the javascript sort function that the two items are equal… Is this correct?

The code …

$(document).ready(function() {
$(‘#ascending’).click(function() {
SORTER.sort(‘.sortable’);
});
$(‘#descending’).click(function() {
SORTER.sort(‘.sortable’, ‘desc’);
});
});

var SORTER = {};
SORTER.sort = function(which, dir) {
SORTER.dir = (dir == “desc”) ? -1 : 1;
$(which).each(function() {
// Find the list items and sort them
var sorted = $(this).find(“> li”).sort(function(a, b) {
return $(a).text().toLowerCase() > $(b).text().toLowerCase() ? SORTER.dir : -SORTER.dir;
});
$(this).append(sorted);
});
};

2

This line here is where the comparison occurs.


return $(a).text().toLowerCase() > $(b).text().toLowerCase() ? SORTER.dir : -SORTER.dir;

It returns one value when it’s greater, if it’s not (therefore being less than or equal to) returns the other value.

There doesn’t appear to be any conflict.

3

After fighting to correct all the errors in my post that hide till I hit submit, I forgot to mention that this code is from page 298 of the Novice To Ninja book from SitePoint.

4

There’s no conflict, its just that there are three possible values to return when sorting according to page 299, those are 1 to indicate that a is > b, -1 to indicate that a < b, and a third value = to indicate that a equals b. The third value of 0 is not needed here.

I just did testing of this to see if two items of equal value caused a problem. It did not, I guess sort is smarter than that. :smiley:

t.