Why does it only print the last thing i tell him to print?

Question

First I print a full sentence and it works, but then when I change the age value and i print it, it only prints the age and not the sentence. Am I missing something?

This is the code: https://teamtreehouse.com/workspaces/28326182#

Answer 1 · 2017-07-01T05:02:13Z

July 1, 2017 5:02am

When I clicked your workspace link it was broken but I'm going to attempt to answer based on what I think might be happening. (Shot in the dark -- I know)

Here's the print function for reference:

function print(message){
    var output = document.getElementById("someDiv");
    output.innerHTML = message;
}

Here's what I'm assuming you're doing:

print("This is a random sentence"); //First Argument
print("Lookey here, another one!"); //Overwriting Argument

//If you try to print it this way it wouldn't work because "output.innerHTML" is being ASSIGNED the message that is being sent to it as an argument in the print function. So the last print call ALWAYS overwrites the ones coming before it

Here's what it should look like:

var html = "";
html += "<p>This is a random sentence</p>";
html += "<p>Lookey here, another one!</p>";
print(html);

//You declare a empty string variable and keep adding to it using the += self assignment operator (not sure if that's a real term, don't quote me) and then call the print function ONE time at the very end sending the variable holding all the text you want to print to the screen

Hope this helps. Good luck!

Answer 2 · 2017-07-01T10:49:22Z

July 1, 2017 10:49am

Thanks Adrien, I understood what I was doing wrong. Anyway this is the code, and following your explanation I understood that the second print() was overwriting the other one. Thanks a lot!

var person = { name : 'Sarah', country : 'US', age : 35, treehouseStudent : true, skills : ['JavaScript', 'HTML', 'CSS'] };

function print(message) { var div = document.getElementById('output'); div.innerHTML = message; } person.name='Edmondo'; var message= 'Hello my name is '+ person.name +' I am from ' + person.country ; person.age +=1; print(message); print(person.age);

Answer 3 · 2017-11-14T15:30:31Z

November 14, 2017 3:30pm

I was noticing this in the final arrays challenge before this course.

It took me a good amount of time to work out what was happening, since that entire snippet of code where you are rewriting a div's innerHTML wasn't explained entirely, and we're told that we'll learn more about it in a later DOM course.

You can kind of see that you can only do it once too, since he keeps adding text to the single message variable

Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Looking to learn something new?

edmondo valvo

edmondo valvo

Why does it only print the last thing i tell him to print?

3 Answers

Adrien Contee

Adrien Contee

edmondo valvo

edmondo valvo

Rod Sanati

Rod Sanati