Understanding Closures In JavaScript

This example shows how you create a closure in JavaScript it uses an alert function that can be incremented and reused/passed around.

The Problem

The following code will alert the number 3 three times. You may have expected it to alert 0,1,2 (don't forget JavaScript is zero based).

var a = {};
for (var i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
    a[i] = function() {
    alert(i);
};

a[0](); // 3
a[1](); // 3
a[2](); // 3

What happens to cause this behaviour is the loop runs once and sets the a[i] property to the function which will alert i:

a[i] = function () {
  alert(i);
};

The loop repeats 3 times (because of i < 3). Then the function stored at each property of a gets run (using a[0]()) etc. The i argument passed into alert is now 3 because the loop has run three times and the variable iin global scope is set to 3.

a[0](); // 3
a[1](); // 3
a[2](); // 3

The Solution

To get around this you can set an IFFE around the internal function:

var a = {};
for (var i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
    (function(j) {
    a[j] = function() {
    alert(j);
   };
}(i));

a[0](); // 3
a[1](); // 3
a[2](); // 3

What this does is provide a closure around the j variable which means that the loop will iterate three times using i then the value of i is passed into the IFFE as the parameter j for each iteration. Because a function closure is now provided by the IFFE around the variable j it will not be global and therefore is set to the loop iteration number as you would expect resulting in:

a[0](); // 0
a[1](); // 1
a[2](); // 2

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