Returning the position of an element in an array

programming flash
1

I’ve got an array (called “thearray”) that I’ve just sorted alphabetically using thearray.sort.
I then wanted to check if a certain item (myItem) was in the array, so I did a loop:

for (var w=0; w<thearray.length; w++){
if (thearray[w]==myItem) trace(“this item has been found in the array”)

Now, I want to know if it’s possible to return the new position number of the item in the array - ie finding the element number of myItem (as in arrayelement[0], arrayelement[1], arrayelement[2]-- the number in the [ ].)

Does this make sense? If not I can explain further. Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanx.