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Consider the following array:

var thingsThatMatter = [
    {"Colour of hair", "High"}, 
    {"Colour of eyes", "Low"}, 
    {"Colour of shoes", "Medium"}
];

Apologies for the example, but the key part here is the high, medium, low parameter.
That's the data I'm working with (1,2,3 would of been much easier...!)

Is there anyway I can easily sort the array, so that the items run in order - High, Medium, Low?

Or, is there a way I can "get" the item that has the value "Low" as a priority parameter?

Note- the structure of this will be changed to numerical later, however for now, this is what I have to work with.

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Do you mean high, medium, and low will be numbers and you need to sort the structure based on that? – NADH Apr 29 '12 at 14:36
2  
That's not syntactically valid JS, btw. Did you mean for the elements to be arrays, or objects? – Matt Ball Apr 29 '12 at 14:36
1  
Have a look at these: stackoverflow.com/… – Felix Kling Apr 29 '12 at 14:38

1 Answer

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Use Array.sort() with a custom compare function.

Here, have a cookie:

var thingsThatMatter = [
    ["Colour of hair", "High"],
    ["Colour of eyes", "Low"],
    ["Colour of shoes", "Medium"]
];

function comparator(a, b) {
    a = comparator.priorities[a[1]];
    b = comparator.priorities[b[1]];

    if (a > b) return 1;
    if (a < b) return -1;
    return 0;
}

comparator.priorities = {
    High: 0,
    Medium: 1,
    Low: 2
}

thingsThatMatter.sort(comparator);

http://jsfiddle.net/mattball/T3hNm/

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1  
I'll place a side-bet that the OP meant for the array to contain objects not arrays. (That is, his typo was , for :, not { for [. We'll see... – Telemachus Apr 29 '12 at 14:40

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