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Need help understanding this syntax

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Apr 07.2009

Good day To you all!

It’s been a while since I last posted here. Lately I’m in the need to expand my knowledge about JS. I hope you can help me out with a query I have:

I don’t understand the following Syntax:

[CODE]var employees = responseXML.getElementsByTagName(“employees”)[0];[/CODE]

How does the [0] work here? Why is it at the end of an statement? Why index 0 ?

Those were a lot of questions, but I hope you can tell me the general functionality of this syntax.

Thank you very much !
Best Regards,

Jose

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JavaScript

3 Comments(s) ↴

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@scragarApr 07.2009 — [CODE]var employees =

responseXML [b]An Xml object[/b]
.getElementsByTagName("employees") [b]An array of employees[/b]
[0]; [b]The first element of the array[/b]
[/CODE]
So it returns the first employee node.
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@J_LoganauthorApr 08.2009 — Wow, JS Syntax is really weird.

I could have assumed that the use of that syntax was for that purpose if the [0] thing would have been inside the parenthesis.

Anyway,

Thank you very much.

Sorry for the delayed response.

Jose
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@dmboydApr 08.2009 — It's really no different than any other object-oriented language. For example, Python does the same:
harry = 'Harry Bob Joe'.split(' ')[0]

In fact, you can use that code in JavaScript as well, though JavaScript requires a RegExp object rather than a string as the argument to the String.split() function:
var harry = 'Harry Bob Joe'.split(/ /)[0];

Edit: If you want a language that is understandable and has an unusual syntax, check out [url=http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C]Objective-C[/url]. It's definitely different! :p
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