How to limit the number of iterations done by setInterval

Question

I display video ads to my users. I don't host these ads by the way; I get them from another company.

When ever an ad is clicked it leaves a cookie in the user's browser. I've created a function that checks the existence of a cookie every 10 seconds.

What I would like to do is to limit the number of times this function can run or the number of seconds it can run for.

Below is the function:

function checkCookie()
{
var cookie=getCookie("PBCBD2A0PBP3D31B");
  if (cookie!=null && cookie!="")
  {
  alert("You clicked on an ad" );
  }

setInterval("checkCookie()", 10000);

So to recap. I want to limit the number of iterations that setInterval("checkCookie()", 10000); can make

Answer 1

When you call setInterval, it returns you an interval ID that you can then use to stop it by calling clearInterval. As such, you'll want to count the iterations in a variable, and once they've reached a certain count, use clearInterval with the ID provided by setInterval.

var iterations = 0;
var interval = setInterval(foo, 10000);
function foo() {
    iterations++;
    if (iterations >= 5)
        clearInterval(interval);
}

Live example