Reserved Word Behavior [duplicate]

Question

While creating a small counter based game, I had an array like this:

var status = ["day","dusk","night","dawn"];

If I tried to access the first index of the array, I would get:

console.log(status[0]); //yields "d"

@monners mentioned it might be a reserved word, so I changed the variable name to xstatus and it worked fine.

My question is: why would status[0] return only the first letter of the first index?

Answer 1

You're modifying window.status which cannot be set to an array:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window.status

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There is some unexplained behaviour in Firefox. While both status and var status at the global scope provide references to the window.status property, var status doesn't flatten the array:

status = ["meagar"];
console.log(window.status[0]); // 'm'

vs

var status = ["meagar"];
console.log(window.status[0]); // 'meagar'

Answer 2

Because it will be saving your array as a flat string and d is the first character (position 0) of the string.

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I believe this goes years back into the old Navigator statusbar days (remember those ticker status bars). The status could only output as string --- arrays, when set to string, are flattened and comma-delimited (e.g. var ar=['foo','bar']; alert(ar);)