Javascript switch statement- very simple, what am I doing wrong?

I'm sure there must be a really simple answer to this, but at the risk of sounding stupid- I can't get this switch statement to work. The input var, 'status' can be either 'public' or 'draft', and I can assure you it is only holding one of those two values as I have alerted it out at various stages, and anyway, the if statement here works. Take a look:

        function switch_status(status){
            if (status == 'public'){
                return false;
            } if (status == 'draft') {
                return true;
            }

^This works, but replacing the 'if' with this 'switch' statement below doesn't work.

            switch(status){
            case 'public':
                return false;
            case 'draft':
                return true;
            }
        }

The first one to provide me with the inevitable embarrassingly simple answer wins my accolade!

EDIT: Here is my full code-

        $('.status').live('click',
                function(){
                    fullClass = $(this).attr('class');
                    id = fullClass.split(' ').slice(-1);
                    status = fullClass.split(' ').slice(-2,-1);
                    var newStatus = switch_status(status);
                    alert(newStatus);
            });

        function switch_status(statu开发者_运维知识库s){
//              if (status == 'public'){
//                  return false;
//              } if (status == 'draft') {
//                  return true;
//              }

            switch(status){
                case 'public':
                    return false;
                case 'draft':
                    return true;
            }
        }

You're passing status as an array of one string (the result of slice) rather than as just a string.

When you check equality between your array and your string, it appears that coercion is causing the equality check to work. But coercion doesn't happen in a switch statement.

If I change

status = fullClass.split(' ').slice(-2,-1);

to

status = fullClass.split(' ').slice(-2,-1)[0];

then it works fine.

I suspect this problem is occuring due to type conversion.

Javascipt is generally a loosely typed language. The if statement you used earlier used a loose == comparison. This worked just fine.

However, switch statements are a different matter. For the case to be a match, the data types must match. In other words, the status must be converted to a string before it is passed to the switch statement.

I used a .each in a jquery loop and compared value to 'this'; I could clearly see that 'this' had the correct value if I used console.log. It worked in the if/else logic but failed in the switch/case logic.

The solution is:

var obj = this.toString();

switch(obj){
    case 'one': ...
    case 'two': ...
}

By forcing the 'this' to a string type, the logic in the switch now works.