3.1 - Search Text For Your Name

What you'll be building

In this project, you'll be writing a short program that checks a block of text for your name.

Specifically, it will check the text for the first letter of your name, then push (add) the number of characters equal to your name's length to an array. By inspecting the array, you'll be able to see if your name was mentioned!

Once you've got the hang of loops, arrays, and if statements, we'll talk about ways this project could be improved.

/*jshint multistr:true */
text = "Blah blah blah blah blah blah Eric \
blah blah blah Eric blah blah Eric blah blah \
blah blah blah blah blah Eric";
var myName = "Eric";
var hits = [];
// Look for "E" in the text
for(var i = 0; i < text.length; i++) {
    if (text[i] === "E") {
        // If we find it, add characters up to
        // the length of my name to the array
        for(var j = i; j < (myName.length + i); j++) {
            hits.push(text[j]);
        }
    }
}
if (hits.length === 0) {
    console.log("Your name wasn't found!");
} else {
    console.log(hits);
}
Declare your variables

We'll start by declaring the three variables we'll be using: text, myName, and hits.

Since text could be quite long, you can use a backslash (\) at the end of each line to make your string "wrap" to the next line, like this:

var text = "Hey, how are you \
doing? My name is Emily.";

In this way, using backlashes (\) is useful because you can avoid really long lines!

You can ignore the /*jshint... line for now. All that does is tell the console to stop worrying about our use of backslash characters for wrapping long lines of text.

Instructions

Declare and set the following three variables:

  1. text, and make it a string containing some text. Place your name in there a couple of times!
  2. myName, and make it a string containing just your name.
  3. hits, and make it an empty array.

Click "Stuck? Get a hint!" if you want to look at examples for declaring and setting variables.

/*jshint multistr:true */
var text = "Hello, my name is ";
var myName = "Jesse";
var hits = [];
Your "if" statement

Nice work! Now let's move on to the ifstatement.

We'll want to place the if statement inside our for loop to make sure the program checks the if statement each time it moves forward through the loop. Essentially, the for loop is saying: "Hey program! Go through every letter in 'text'." The if statement will say: if you see something interesting, push that text into an array!"

You can treat a string like an array of characters. For instance, you know that

var myArray = ['hello', 'world'];
myArray[0];    // equals 'hello'
But this also works on strings!
var myName = 'Eric';
myName[0];    // equals 'E'
Your second "for" loop

Okay! Last loopy step: add another forloop, this time inside the body of your ifstatement (between the if's {}s).

This loop will make sure each character of your name gets pushed to the final array. The if statement says: "If we find the first letter of the name, start the second forloop!" This loop says: "I'm going to add characters to the array until I hit the length of the user's name." So if your name is 11 letters long, your loop should add 11 characters to hits if it ever sees the first letter of myName in text.

For your second for loop, keep the following in mind:

First, you'll want to set your second loop's iterator to start at the first one, so it picks up where that one left off. If your first loop starts with

for(var i = 0; // rest of loop setup

your second should be something like

for(var j = i; // rest of loop setup

Second, think hard about when your loop should stop. Check the Hint if you get stuck!

Finally, in the body of your loop, have your program use the .push() method ofhits. Just like strings and arrays have a.length method, arrays have a .push()method that adds the thing between parentheses to the end of the array. For example,

newArray = [];
newArray.push('hello');
newArray[0];   // equals 'hello'
Log it!

Perfect! You've now got the engine of your search program running. It will:

  1. Loop through the array,
  2. Compare each letter to the first letter of your name, and if it sees that letter:
  3. It will push that letter and all the letters that follow it to an array, stopping when the number of letters it pushes are equal to the number of letters in your name.
Victory!

You've done it! Nice work.

Now, as we mentioned, this system isn't perfect. For instance, if the paragraph contains both "Eric" and "Eddie", we'll see this in our hits array:

['E','r','i','c','E','d','d','i','e'];
Think about how you might fine-tune this program to make sure it only finds exact matches for your name. Search the Internet to see if there are any built-in JavaScript string methods that can help!