JavaScript - short way of declaring an associative array

Question

Is there a short way of declaring an associative array like in PHP?

$myArray = array('a' => 'b'); // PHP Way 

In JavaScript I'd do it this way:

var myArray = []; myArray['a'] = 'b'; 

I'm not looking for JavaScript objects.

Answer 1

Declare an object like this:

var myArray = {"a": "b", "c": "d"}; 

... and then refer to each item like this:

var somethingElse = myArray["a"]; //Sets "somethingElse" to "b". 

As @Chris and @Marc mention in the comments: in JavaScript, objects ARE associative arrays, and vice versa, they just refer to two different ways of doing the same thing. For Example...

var somethingElse = myArray["a"]; var anotherVariable = myArray.a; 

... do the same thing.

Answer 2

JavaScript does not have associative arrays. In your example, you declare myArray as array but then you assign an object to it. So your code is not different from this:

var myObject = {}; myObject['a'] = 'b'; 

Update: A little correction. Actually, the original code does not destroy the array. It just appends a regular property to it. That's possible because JavaScript arrays are a subset of JavaScript objects.