JavaScript Collections API?

Question

I've searched quite a while for a Collections API (list, set) for JS and surprisingly I could only this: http://www.coffeeblack.org/work/jscollections/

This is exactly what I was looking for, but I'm wondering why doesn't jQuery provide that? What am I missing on? Or, perhaps, how ineffective are my searching techniques?

I know that arrays support pop() and push(), but I need contains() for example.

Answer 1

You can try js_cols, a collections library for JavaScript.

Answer 2

Can't you use the jquery collection plugin.

http://plugins.jquery.com/project/Collection

Answer 3

jQuery's primary focus is the DOM. It doesn't and shouldn't try and be all things to all people, so it doesn't have much in the way of collections support.

For maps and sets, I'd like to shamelessly point you in the direction of my own implementations of these: http://code.google.com/p/jshashtable/

Regarding lists, Array provides much of what you need. Like most methods you might want for arrays, you can knock together a contains() method in a few lines (most of which are to deal with IE <= 8's lack of support for the indexOf() method):

Array.prototype.contains = Array.prototype.indexOf ?
    function(val) {
        return this.indexOf(val) > -1;
    } :
    function(val) {
        var i = this.length;
        while (i--) {
            if (this[i] === val) {
                return true;
            }
        }
        return false;
    };

["a", "b", "c"].contains("a"); // true

Answer 4

You can also try buckets, it has the most used collections.