12 FILTERING, SEARCHING & SORTING

If your pages contain a lot of data, there are tree techniques that you can use to help your users to find the content they are looking for.

FILTERING

Filtering lets you reduce a set of values, by selecting the ones that meet stated criteria.

SEARCH

Search lets you show the items that match one or more words the user specifies.

SORTING

Sorting lets you reorder a set of items on the page based on criteria (for example, alphabetically).

Before you get to see how to deal with filtering, searching, and sorting, it is important to consider how you are going to store the data that you are working with. In this chapter many of the examples will use arrays to hold data stored in objects using literal notation.

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JAVASCRIPT ARRAY METHODS

An array is a kind of object. All arrays have the methods listed below; their property names are index numbers. You will often see arrays used to store complex data (including other objects).

Each item in an array is sometimes called an element. It does not mean that the array holds HTML elements; element is just the name given to the pieces of information in the array. *Note some methods only work in IE9+.

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