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

  • By
    Responsive and Infinitely Scalable JS Animations

    Back in late 2012 it was not easy to find open source projects using requestAnimationFrame() - this is the hook that allows Javascript code to synchronize with a web browser's native paint loop. Animations using this method can run at 60 fps and deliver fantastic...

  • By
    Create a CSS Cube

    CSS cubes really showcase what CSS has become over the years, evolving from simple color and dimension directives to a language capable of creating deep, creative visuals.  Add animation and you've got something really neat.  Unfortunately each CSS cube tutorial I've read is a bit...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools 1.2 Tooltips: Customize Your Tips

    I've never met a person that is "ehhhh" about XHTML/javascript tooltips; people seem to love them or hate them. I'm on the love side of things. Tooltips give you a bit more information about something than just the element itself (usually...

  • By
    CSS Vertical Centering

    Front-end developing is beautiful, and it's getting prettier by the day. Nowadays we got so many concepts, methodologies, good practices and whatnot to make our work stand out from the rest. Javascript (along with its countless third party libraries) and CSS have grown so big, helping...

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!