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
    CSS Animations Between Media Queries

    CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing Canvas Demos

    The <canvas> element has been a revelation for the visual experts among our ranks.  Canvas provides the means for incredible and efficient animations with the added bonus of no Flash; these developers can flash their awesome JavaScript skills instead.  Here are nine unbelievable canvas demos that...

Incredible Demos

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!