indexOf returning -1 despite object being in the array - Javascript in Google Spreadsheet Scripts

Question

I am writing a script for a Google Docs Spreadsheet to read a list of directors and add them to an array if they do not already appear within it.

However, I cannot seem to get indexOf to return anything other than -1 for elements that are contained within the array.

Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong? Or point me to an easier way of doing this?

This is my script:

function readRows() {
var column = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet().getRangeByName("Director");
var values = column.getValues();
var numRows = column.getNumRows();
var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet();
var sheet = ss.getSheets()[0];

var directors = new Array();

for (var i = 0; i <= numRows - 1; i++) {
    var row = values[i];
    if (directors.indexOf(row) == -1) {
        directors.push(row);
    } else {

        directors.splice(directors.indexOf(row), 1, row);

    }
}

for (var i = 2; i < directors.length; i++) {
    var cell = sheet.getRange("F" + [i]);
    cell.setValue(directors[i]);
}
};

Answer 1

I ran into a similar problem with a spreadsheet function that took a range as an object. In my case, I was wanting to do a simple search for a fixed set of values (in another array).

The problem is, your "column" variable doesn't contain a column -- it contains a 2D array. Therefore, each value is it's own row (itself an array).

I know I could accomplish the following example using the existing function in the spreadsheet, but this is a decent demo of dealing with the 2D array to search for a value:

function flatten(range) {
  var results = [];
  var row, column;

  for(row = 0; row < range.length; row++) {
    for(column = 0; column < range[row].length; column++) {
      results.push(range[row][column]);
    }
  }
  return results;
}

function getIndex(range, value) {
  return flatten(range).indexOf(value);
}

So, since I wanted to simply search the entire range for the existance of a value, I just flattened it into a single array. If you really are dealing with 2D ranges, then this type of flattening and grabbing the index may not be very useful. In my case, I was looking through a column to find the intersection of two sets.