Fill an Array with Sequential Values

By  on  

I've been contributing to Mozilla's awesome DevTools debugger because, well, I want to give back to the Firefox Engineers and all the developers who have stayed loyal to Firefox.  Having my hand in loads of Mozilla projects is really satisfying, especially for my ego.

In any event, one task required me to fill an array with every number in a sequence, then I would filter out unwanted items based on another array.  Here's how you can fill a range within an array:

const fillRange = (start, end) => {
  return Array(end - start + 1).fill().map((item, index) => start + index);
};

const allLines = fillRange(0, numLines - 1);

// [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...]

From there I could filter out what I didn't want:

let executableLines = [/* series of line numbers with code */];
const emptyLines = allLines.filter(i => !executableLines.includes(i));

When the feature gets merged (...and no one complains about their Firefox debugger...) I'll share more about  my contribution!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools Gone Wild: Element Flashing

    If you're like me and lay awake in bed at night, you've flipped on the TV and seen the commercials: misguided, attention-starved college girls fueled by alcohol ruining their futures by flashing lame camera-men on Spring Break. Why do they do it? Attention...

  • By
    Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Using MooTools 1.2

    As you can probably tell, I try to mix some fun in with my MooTools madness but I also try to make my examples as practical as possible. Well...this may not be one of those times. I love movies and useless movie trivia so naturally I'm...

Discussion

  1. Would the instruction

    const allLines = fillRange(0, numLines - 1);

    not result in an array starting with zero as the first value?

    • Yes, you’re right! I’ve updated the post!

  2. Jorge Ortega

    Nice! Thanks to this post I could do this:

    // Array of 24 hours string values ['00'...'23']
    const hours = Array(24).fill().map((item, index) => index < 10 ? 0${index} : ${index})
    
    // Array of 60 minutes string values ['00'...'59']
    const minutes = Array(60).fill().map((item, index) => index < 10 ? 0${index} : ${index})
    
  3. Luca Borrione

    Great post! Little contribution:

    const fillRange = (start, end) => {
    	return [...Array(end - start + 1)].map((item, index) => start + index);
    }
    
    • Tracy-Gregory Gilmore

      Using an arrow function with a single expression does not require a return statement or statement block. Thus, the line of code above could be reduced to.

      const fillRange = (start, end) => 
         [...Array(end - start + 1)].map((item, index) => start + index);
      
  4. Nicolás Casanova

    This is great, but, one question. If I want to have a list with decimals numbers, how can I do it?
    example: 0.1 to 5.0. (resp: 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 … 4.8, 4.9, 5)
    How can I do this?
    Thanks! :D

    • MR T-G J GILMORE

      You could always map() the output of fillRange.

      const decimals = fillRange(0, 50).map(int => int / 10);
      
    • MR T-G J GILMORE

      That should have been 1 to 51:

      const decimals = fillRange(1, 51).map(int => int / 10);
      

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!