How do I avoid looping through an array to find a partial match?

Question

I am looping through an array of english phrases, and if i find a match, with the current text node, i replace it with it's translation in the non_english array. All of that works 100% for exact matches.

But for partial matches, I need to use the .match command, which allows for partial matches.

My code to search for exact matches is like this:

var found = $.inArray(value,en_lang);

Then if there is a found value, then do replacement of text. This method is fast and I love it.

However to do partial word/phrase matching, I have to use this looping code.

// loop thru language arrays
for (var x = en_count; x > 0; x--) {

// assign current from/to variables for replace
var from = en_lang[x];
var to = other_lang[x];

// if value match do translation
if (value.match(from)) {
    content(node, value.replace(from, to));
}

// mark this node as translated
if ($.browser.msie == 'false') {
    $(node).data('translated', 'yes');
}

}

This does the job but is pretty slow. After a lot of research, I have found that I can convert the english array to a list-based string via the join command.

But I am unable to come up with a function to search this list for a partial match, and return the position in the list.

I was trying out this old js function created in 2006. But I can't figure out how to get the position back, correctly.

function listfind(list, value, delimiters) {

    if (!delimiters) {
        var delimiters = ','
    }

    _TempListSplitArray = list.split(delimiters)

    var FoundIdx = 0;

    for (i = 0; i < _TempListSplitArray.length; i++) {
        if (_TempListSplitArray[i] == value) {
            FoundIdx = i + 1;
            break
        }
        if (value.match(_TempListSplitArray[i])) {
            FoundIdx = i + 1;
            break
        }
    }
    return FoundIdx
}

Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

Javascript has a foreach type of system but its still based on a loop

var array = ['hello', 'world'];
for(var key in array){
  alert(array[key]);
}

Thats the best your getting for looping though an array but this way allso works with objects

var obj = {'one':'hello', 'two':'world'];
for(var key in obj){
   alert("key: "+key+" value: "+obj[key]);
}

UPDATED for Comments on your question You can just replace the text you know

var str = "hello World";
str = str.replace("hello", "Bye bye");
alert(str);