Calling an asynchronous function within a for loop in JavaScript

Question

I have the following code:

for(var i = 0; i < list.length; i++){
    mc_cli.get(list[i], function(err, response) {
        do_something(i);
    });
}

mc_cli is a connection to a memcached database. As you can imagine, the callback function is asynchronous, thus it may be executed when the for loop already ended. Also, when calling in this way do_something(i) it always uses the last value of the for loop.

I tried with a closure in this way

do_something((function(x){return x})(i)) 

but apparently this is again using always the last value of the index of the for loop.

I also tried declaring a function before the for loop like so:

var create_closure = function(i) {
    return function() {
        return i;
    }
}

and then calling

do_something(create_closure(i)())

but again without success, with the return value always being the last value of the for loop.

Can anybody tell me what am I doing wrong with closures? I thought I understood them but I can't figure why this is not working.

Answer 1

Since you're running through an array, you can simply use forEach which provides the list item, and the index in the callback. Iteration will have its own scope.

list.forEach(function(listItem, index){
  mc_cli.get(listItem, function(err, response) {
    do_something(index);
  });
});