How to make a JQuery associative array from a HTML unordered list

Question

Currently in my JQuery script I have a hard coded array:

var arrayList = [
    {"id":"1","category":"foo1","title":"bar1","image":"images/foobar1.gif"},
    {"id":"2","category":"foo2","title":"bar2","image":"images/foobar2.gif"},
    etc....
];

Instead of that array being hard coded in my script I need to create that dynamically from a set of HTML unordered lists that are generated from the system so the markup would be:

<ul>
    <li>1</li>
    <li>foo1</li>
    <li>bar1</li>
    <li>images/foobar1.gif</li>
</ul>

<ul>
    <li>2</li>
    <li>foo2</li>
    <li>bar2</li>
    <li>images/foobar2.gif</li>
</ul>

etc....

I would need:

var arrayList = new Array (that has been created)

How can I do this so that a new array object is created and it doesn't just see the output as a text string?

Answer 1

First, for more flexibility, I'd suggest you modify your markup to store the list item keys in data attributes:

<ul>
    <li data-key="id">1</li>
    <li data-key="category">foo1</li>
    <li data-key="title">bar1</li>
    <li data-key="image">images/foobar1.gif</li>
</ul>

<ul>
    <li data-key="id">2</li>
    <li data-key="category">foo2</li>
    <li data-key="title">bar2</li>
    <li data-key="image">images/foobar2.gif</li>
</ul>

From there, you can use map() to build your objects:

var arrayList = $("ul").map(function() {
    var obj = {};
    $("li", this).each(function() {
        var $this = $(this);
        obj[$this.data("key")] = $this.text();
    });
    return obj;
}).get();

You can see the results in this fiddle.