Before finishing the chapter, I want to introduce you to a few more object- related concepts. I’ll start by introducing some generally useful array methods.
We saw push and pop, which add and remove elements at the end of an array, in “Methods” on page 62. The corresponding methods for adding and removing things at the start of an array are called unshift and shift.
let todoList = [];
function remember(task) {
todoList.push(task);
}
function getTask() {
return todoList.shift();
}
function rememberUrgently(task) {
todoList.unshift(task);
}
That program manages a queue of tasks. You add tasks to the end of the queue by calling remember(“groceries”), and when you’re ready to do something, you call getTask() to get (and remove) the front item from the queue. The rememberUrgently function also adds a task but adds it to the front instead of the back of the queue.
To search for a specific value, arrays provide an indexOf method. The method searches through the array from the start to the end and returns the index at which the requested value was found—or -1 if it wasn’t found.
To search from the end instead of the start, there’s a similar method called lastIndexOf.
console.log([1, 2, 3, 2, 1].indexOf(2));
// → 1
console.log([1, 2, 3, 2, 1].lastIndexOf(2));
// → 3
Both indexOf and lastIndexOf take an optional second argument that indicates where to start searching.
Another fundamental array method is slice, which takes start and end indices and returns an array that has only the elements between them. The start index is inclusive, the end index exclusive.
console.log([0, 1, 2, 3, 4].slice(2, 4));
// → [2, 3]
console.log([0, 1, 2, 3, 4].slice(2));
// → [2, 3, 4]
When the end index is not given, slice will take all of the elements after the start index. You can also omit the start index to copy the entire array.
The concat method can be used to glue arrays together to create a new array, similar to what the + operator does for strings.
The following example shows both concat and slice in action. It takes an array and an index, and it returns a new array that is a copy of the original array with the element at the given index removed.
function remove(array, index) {
return array.slice(0, index)
.concat(array.slice(index + 1));
}
console.log(remove([“a”, “b”, “c”, “d”, “e”], 2));
// → [“a”, “b”, “d”, “e”]
If you pass concat an argument that is not an array, that value will be added to the new array as if it were a one-element array.
Source: Haverbeke Marijn (2018), Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming,
No Starch Press; 3rd edition.