Recursive Array.flat

By  on  

There was much talk about Array.prototype.flat during its early stages, starting with the name alone. Many developers preferred the name flatten but the spec differed from MooTools' implementation. MooTools would recursively flatten an array but the new, official flat implementation defaults one level of flattening,.

The current implementation of Array.prototype.flat is:

[1, 2, [3], [[4]]].flat(/* depth */);
// [1,2,3,[4]]

.flat only flattens arrays to one level by default, but what if you want a truly flattened array? You can use Infinity and flat's depth argument to make that happen:

[1, 2, [3], [[4]], [[[[[[6]]]]]]].flat(Infinity);
// [1,2,3,4,6]

I find the method name a bit misleading but I understand why they went to a single level. The method name smush was thrown around, which would've been the worst method name since stringify!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Digg-Style Dynamic Share Widget Using the Dojo Toolkit

    I've always seen Digg as a very progressive website. Digg uses experimental, ajaxified methods for comments and mission-critical functions. One nice touch Digg has added to their website is their hover share widget. Here's how to implement that functionality on your site...

  • By
    jQuery topLink Plugin

    Last week I released a snippet of code for MooTools that allowed you to fade in and out a "to the top" link on any page. Here's how to implement that functionality using jQuery. The XHTML A simple link. The CSS A little CSS for position and style. The jQuery...

Discussion

  1. Array.prototype.flat

    have an argument to specify the depth (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/flat#Parameters):

    [1, 2, [3], [[4]], [[[[[[6]]]]]]].flat(Infinity); // [1,2,3,4,6]

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