JavaScript JS - For Loop Question

[FelixTheNewbie]

Hi there!

I have a newbie question. My task is the following.

There is the array "courses" consisting of a unknown number of arrays with strings that show the students of the course. I want to find out which course in "courses" is the smallest one. My thinking was the following.

// Find out how many courses currently exist
        var coursesCount = courses.length
      
        // Compare the number of students of each course with the next one and filter out the smallest one
        for (var i = 0; i <= coursesCount; i++){
            console.log(courses[I].length)
            if (i == 0){
                var smallestCourse = courses[I];
            }
            else {
                if (courses[I].length < smallestCourse.length){
                    smallestCourse = course[I];  //red line (does not show in code block)
                }
            }
        }

// Tell me what members are in the smallest course
console.log(smallestCourse)

The problem is that I always receive the error message: Uncaught ReferenceError: course is not defined at red line
I cannot wrap my head around it. Why should course be undefined since the loop is running all numbers from 0 til the max number of courses?

 

[Axolotl Hydra]

Heya,

So from a quicker overview, it just looks like you've given a little bit of a typo; rather than spelling courses, you've written it as course (missing the extra 's').

With that mentioned, there are a couple of other things I'd like to mention/point out in your code.

1. I'm a little bit worried about your course, and it appears to recommend the usage of 'var', the usage of 'var' is now outdated and actually recommended to be avoided in most situations. You should instead be defining your variables using one of the below (you can mix and match)

1. let variableName - Used if you plan on changing this variable's data.​

2. const variableName - Used if you plan on keeping the variables data the same throughout the lifespan of the program.​

​

2. When making use of conditional statements (if blocks) in JS it's recommended to rather make use of === as apposed to ==; the reason this is recommended is that when you make use of the double equal sign we open the risk of bugs as it does not care about data types, for example if(0 == "0") //This is true but logically we should expect this to be false because one is an int and the other is a string, however, when you use the triple equal sign JS checks for both value and data type.

I hope this helped! Let me know if the above solution fixed the problem or if you have any additional questions!