Convert Table to an Array

Question

I have seen many posts about how to turn an array into a table, but not nearly as many going the other way. I\'m looking to take a table like this:

Answer 1

So what I did is select all the tr elements and iterate over them. Next i check to make sure I am not looking at th elements. Then i use the cols array to populate the objects. This could have been simpler (2d array) but I use cols since that is what you had as your output.

var i, items, item, dataItem, data = [];
var cols = [ "category", "brandName", "whenObtained", "howObtained", "howOftenWorn",
 "whereMade", "hasGraphic" ];

$("#dataTable tr").each(function() {
    items = $(this).children('td');

    if(items.length === 0) { // return if this tr only contains th
        return;
    }

    dataItem = {};
    for(i = 0; i < cols.length; i+=1) {
        item = items.eq(i);
        if(item) {
            dataItem[cols[i]] = item.html();
        }
    }
    data.push(dataItem);
});