javascript - How to find index of all occurrences of element in array?

Question

I am trying to find the index of all the instances of an element, say, "Nano", in a JavaScript array.

var Cars = ["Nano", "Volvo", "BMW", "Nano", "VW", "Nano"];

I tried jQuery.inArray, or similarly, .indexOf(), but it only gave the index of the last instance of the element, i.e. 5 in this case.

How do I get it for all instances?

Answer 1

The .indexOf() method has an optional second parameter that specifies the index to start searching from, so you can call it in a loop to find all instances of a particular value:

function getAllIndexes(arr, val) {
    var indexes = [], i = -1;
    while ((i = arr.indexOf(val, i+1)) != -1){
        indexes.push(i);
    }
    return indexes;
}

var indexes = getAllIndexes(Cars, "Nano");

You don't really make it clear how you want to use the indexes, so my function returns them as an array (or returns an empty array if the value isn't found), but you could do something else with the individual index values inside the loop.

UPDATE: As per VisioN's comment, a simple for loop would get the same job done more efficiently, and it is easier to understand and therefore easier to maintain:

function getAllIndexes(arr, val) {
    var indexes = [], i;
    for(i = 0; i < arr.length; i++)
        if (arr[i] === val)
            indexes.push(i);
    return indexes;
}