Need a quick debug, please

Anyone know why this isn't outputting anything? Prompt shows up once, which makes me think it's the while loop.

I'm calling the function through a body onload event.

Nevermind, got it.

So is it just Unterminated Loop ??

No, it terminates with a closing bracket; the problem was in line 8 where I was using the wrong syntax for the "createElement" method.

Something about chaining appendChild like that makes me cringe. I don't know why, but changing scope within a chain of command like that just seems wrong to me. convenient, perhaps, complicated and a nightmare to debug, likely.

Honestly I'm just now taking my javscript course so I'm sure I'll have more questions in the coming weeks, and my js will look horrid. Could you explain why chaining the appendChild method is a bad thing, and what you mean by changing the scope?

"getElementById" gives you a hint at what the next element referenced in the chain will be, but appendChild is ambiguous. Should a reference to the element a node was appended to be returned, or a reference to the node that was appended ?

I think I understand your point. Would you mind sharing a better solution for the above code for future reference?

I would do something like this.

Just about all of that I understand...except for one piece:



I assume the split is for dimmensioning an array using the commas as the divider for each term. Whether that's correct or not...what is all the "/\s*,\s*/" mumbo jumbo?

split is a string method which will accept either a string, or a regular expression as a delimiter.

In this case, it's splitting the string returned from prompt() using a comma, optionally including any amount of whitespace on either side of the comma to account for people who naturally put spaces after or before commas.

okay, so this is what I'm gathering, not knowing anything about regular expressions:
"\s" is the regular expression for space
"*" means "any amount of"

That about right?

Also; the "/" is used for escaping, why are you putting it in different positions for each "\s*"

Eh, it's such a rarity that I sound like such a noob, I promise; but these are things I know I won't learn in class...my college instructor isn't very explanatory.

\s is what's called a "meta character". Basically it stands for a group of characters. There are more meta characters, such as \d which means any numeric character, 0-9. \s means "whitespace", not just the space character, but tabs, newlines, etc. I tend to use \s instead of a literal space in my regular expressions because they're easier to read.

Yes, the asterisk "*" in this case means any amount of, or more commonly "zero or more times". It's what's called a quantifier. Other quantifiers include the plus sign which means "one or more times", the question mark which means "zero or one time", and a range which is specified in braces, "{2,7}" which in that example would mean "two to seven times".

The "/" (forward slash) isn't used for escaping, the "\" (backwards slash) is. The backwards slash is also used for marking meta-characters. The forward slashes you see are "pattern delimiters". Pattern delimiters mark the beginning and the end of the pattern.

Thanks for taking the time to clear that up JB. I think I've got my fill of new information for the day, but I'm sure there'll be more questions to come later down the road.