jQuery: associative arrays

Unlike PHP, JavaScript has no true notion of associative arrays. A quick-and-dirty way to get this kind of result is as follows:

var assocArray = new Array();
assocArray['CSS'] = 'A stylesheet language.';
assocArray['DOM'] = 'An interface for web documents.';
assocArray['HTML5'] = 'The future of HTML.';

A more elegant solution is to use object literals:

   
    var assocArrObj = {
    
        CSS: 'A stylesheet language.',
        DOM: 'An interface for web documents.',
        HTML5: 'The future of HTML.'
    
    
    };

jQuery allows us to iterate through this kind of objects with the $.each() method:

$(document).ready(function()
    
    $.each(assocArrObj, function(key) {
    
        alert(key + ' ' + assocArrObj[key]);
    
    });
    
    

});

The above code will alert each key followed by its value. As you can see, this is a more elegant way than the usual for...in loop.