how to prevent adding duplicate keys to a javascript array

Generally speaking, this is better accomplished with an object instead since JavaScript doesn’t really have associative arrays:

var foo = { bar: 0 };

Then use in to check for a key:

if ( !( 'bar' in foo ) ) {
    foo['bar'] = 42;
}

As was rightly pointed out in the comments below, this method is useful only when your keys will be strings, or items that can be represented as strings (such as numbers).