How to find if an array contains a specific string in JavaScript/jQuery? [duplicate]
You really don't need jQuery for this.
var myarr = ["I", "like", "turtles"];var arraycontainsturtles = (myarr.indexOf("turtles") > -1);Hint: indexOf returns a number, representing the position where the specified searchvalue occurs for the first time, or -1 if it never occurs
or
function arrayContains(needle, arrhaystack){ return (arrhaystack.indexOf(needle) > -1);}It's worth noting that array.indexOf(..) is not supported in IE < 9, but jQuery's indexOf(...) function will work even for those older versions.
jQuery offers $.inArray:
Note that inArray returns the index of the element found, so 0 indicates the element is the first in the array. -1 indicates the element was not found.
Edit 3.5 years later
$.inArray is effectively a wrapper for Array.prototype.indexOf in browsers that support it (almost all of them these days), while providing a shim in those that don't. It is essentially equivalent to adding a shim to Array.prototype, which is a more idiomatic/JSish way of doing things. MDN provides such code. These days I would take this option, rather than using the jQuery wrapper.
Edit another 3 years later
Gosh, 6.5 years?!
The best option for this in modern Javascript is Array.prototype.includes:
var found = categories.includes('specialword');No comparisons and no confusing -1 results. It does what we want: it returns true or false. For older browsers it's polyfillable using the code at MDN.
Here you go:
$.inArray('specialword', arr)This function returns a positive integer (the array index of the given value), or -1 if the given value was not found in the array.
Live demo: http://jsfiddle.net/simevidas/5Gdfc/
You probably want to use this like so:
if ( $.inArray('specialword', arr) > -1 ) { // the value is in the array}