JavaScript Logofor-in and for-of both provide a way to iterate over an object or array. The difference between them is: for-in provides access to the object keys ,
whereas the for-of operator provides access to the values of those keys.

Iterating over an object or array is a pretty routine task with JavaScript, in fact, it’s hard to imagine a day when you don’t’ need to perform this action. When Iterating over an array, things are a bit easier because you can leverage the array’s “length” property to set up your iteration. But when you need to iterate over the properties of an object, things get a little sticky.

Why For-In vs For-Of

In his article, I will demonstrate the difference between the for-in and for-of JavaScript operators. Now, while these two methods may seem to provide the same functionality, actually, they do not. In fact, you might say that they are polar opposites. The for-in operator returns the keys of an object of array, whereas the for-of operator provides access to the values of these keys.

For a better understanding, let’s take a look at some examples.

for-in – Example # 1

In Example # 1, we use a for-in loop to iterate over the elements of the days array. Now, since we are creating the variable: “day in days”, on each iteration of the loop, we have access to a day variable, which represents the element over which we are currently iterating. The output for this example can be seen in line #s 8-15, and the purpose of this example is to demonstrate that the for-in operator provides the keys of an object, not the values of those keys. It is possible to get ahold of these values, which we will see in a moment, but, for now, I just wanted to point out that for-in provides direct access to the keys of the object over which we are iterating.

Using Bracket Notation – Example # 2

Example # 2 is virtually identical to Example # 1, in that we leverage almost the exact same code to iterate over the days array. The difference here is that we manage to get ahold of the key values by using bracket-notation. So, instead of outputting console.log(day), we output console.log(days[day]). In a pseudocode kind of way, we are saying: “give me the value of the days property that had this key”. The output for this example can be seen in line #s 10-14, and it is exactly what we wanted: we see the value for each key. This does feel a little hackey though, so let’s see if we can do better than this.

for-of – Example # 3

In Example # 3, we’re able to achieve our goal by leveraging the for-of operator. Simply by using for-of (instead of for-in), we’re able to access the value of each key. So, not only is this a non-hackey way to approach this problem, it is also cleaner and easier to read.