Earlier this week I was working on a coding problem that involved looping through characters in strings. I wanted to loop over all the characters in two strings to determine whether they were anagrams. This kind of task is common in technical interview situations.

This made me take a closer look at Javascript for loops. I was especially interested in the for...of and for...in loops, so I wrote this post to share what I found out.

Looping Through Elements in a String using for...of

So, what’s a good way to accomplish this goal? One approach is to use a traditional for loop:

for (let i = 0; i < string.length; i++) {
  console.log(string.charAt(i));
}

This kind of for loop has been around in Javascript since its inception twenty years ago. However, ES6 introduced some spiffy new syntax.

Since the introduction of ES6, you can use a for...of loop:

for (character of string) {
  console.log(character);
}

Isn’t the for...of statement much easier to read than the traditional for loop! It also requires less typing, which means less room for error.

Are for...of and for...in Interchangeable?

TLDR: No, they iterate over different things.

Per MDN:

The for...of statement iterates over values that the iterable object defines to be iterated over.

The for...in statement iterates over the enumerable properties of an object, in an arbitrary order.

What is an iterable object?

An object is iterable if it defines its iteration behavior, such as what values are looped over in a for...of construct.

An object defines its iteration behavior when the object (or one of its prototypes up its prototype chain) has a property with a Symbol.iterator key.

Here are Javascript’s built-in Iterables:

• String
• Array
• TypedArray
• Map
• Set

What are enumerable properties of an object?

According to MDN, enumerable properties are those properties whose internal enumerable flag is set to true.

This was a little cryptic to me at first glance. How can you tell whether an internal enumerable flag is set to true for a property?

Well, it turns out that there is a method baked right into the Object.prototype that answers this question. The method is called propertyIsEnumerable().

Once again MDN has a great example demonstrating how to use this method to check whether a specified property is enumerable. Here is a link to MDN’s example.

Back to My Example

Let’s take a look back at our example to confirm whether for...of and/or for...in works:

let myString = 'valar morghulis';

'hello world'[Symbol.iterator]();
// StringIterator {}

console.log(myString.propertyIsEnumerable([1]));
// true

As demonstrated above, strings have the Symbol.iterator method. In addition, strings are indexed by character. Thus, you can use for...of or a for...in statement to iterate over characters in a string.