Chapter 3, Exercise 4

rhieger · February 12th, 2014, 01:50 PM

I have been truly struggling with Exercise 4. I am what you might call an intermediate beginner and if this question has come up before, I apologize, but I searched the forum and could not find a reference to this.

Exercise 4 calls for an automated times table that asks the user for what times table he or she wishes, then calculates and displays it. The process continues until the user enters -1, which breaks out of a while loop.

Being a little stumped, I checked the answer in Appendix A and entered this code. No matter what I did, it did not work properly, so I attempted modification of this code.

What happens no matter what I do is that if a user puts in a value other than -1, the same prompt for a number reappears until -1 is entered. Then the times table is calculated and displayed. In other words, there is an unwanted repetition of the first prompt box. Here is my modified code:

Code:

// Function to output multiplication table.
			
function doMultiplicationTable(tableValue, startValue, endValue) {
				
for (; startValue <= endValue; startValue++) {
					
document.write(tableValue + " * " + startValue + " = " +
(tableValue * startValue) + "<br />");
					
}	// end for
				
}	// end doMultiplicationTable(tableValue, startValue, endValue)
			
/*
*
* Get user input for calculation of timestable. Enclose within a
* while loop whose condition is to continue unless the times table
* value is equal to -1.
*
*/
			
var timesTable;
			
while ( ( timesTable = prompt("What times table do you want calculated?", -1) ) != -1 ) {
				
while ( isNaN(timesTable) ) {
					
timesTable = prompt(timesTable + " is not a valid number. Please retry.", -1);
					
}
				
if (timesTable == -1) {
					
break;
					
}
				
document.write("<p>The " + timesTable + " times table:</p>");
				
doMultiplicationTable(timesTable, 1, 12);
				
}

Any assistance or insight is greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Robert Hieger

summon_the_krakken · May 15th, 2015, 08:16 AM

I'm not seeing the same issue. If I make an HTML file and put your code in a script block and run it, I get a prompt, enter say 2, the multiplication table is displayed on the page, and the prompt is then shown again. Repeats as it should until -1 is entered. I even put in a counter variable that I incremented within the outer while loop, and it's only incremented by 1

Code:

var counter = 0;
while ( ( timesTable = prompt("What times table do you want calculated?\nEnter -1 to quit.\nCounter: "+counter, -1) ) != -1 ) {
  .
  .
  .
  counter++
  document.write("<p>The " + timesTable + " times table:</p>");

  doMultiplicationTable(timesTable, 1, 12);

}

kevinvishal · September 15th, 2016, 11:39 AM

Hello,

I don't have any programming background, I just started learning javascript and got struck at chapter 3 Exercise 3 and 4 of 4th edition:

Why do we use semicolon (;) at starting of FOR loop. It's throwing up error if i don't use that