Flavoring For Loops With Multiple If…Else Statements and a Dash of Booleans

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

While creating a ‘Hangman’ style game for my capstone JavaScript project I ran into an interesting problem regarding loops. Specifically, how can I loop through an array of characters in a word, and do only one thing if the character is part of the array, and only another thing if it’s not?

Outlining the Problem

I started by creating a function to split a word string into an array of characters:

// My ‘bank’ of words and clues:
var wordBank = [
    ["bumblebee", "buzz buzz"],
    ["jacket", "baby it’s cold outside"],
    ["yesterday", "not today or tomorrow but..."]
  ]
// My function to split the word string into a character string and set it equal to arr:
function splitWord(word) {
    arr = [...word];
    console.log(arr);
    }
// run the function:
splitWord(wordBank[0][0]);
// Output:
["b", "u", "m", "b", "l", "e", "b", "e", "e"]

I used the oninput event in my input field to set the character entered to a variable automatically. When the ‘Check Letter’ button was clicked, it would run another function to compare that character to all the characters in my ‘bumblebee’ array.