Array.prototype.at

By  on  

Working with arrays is an essential skill in any programming language, especially JavaScript, as we continue to rely on external data APIs. JavaScript has added methods like find and `findIndex recently, but one syntax I love from languages like Python is retrieving values by negative indexes.

When you want to get the value of the last item in an array, you end up with an archaic expression:

const arr = ["zero", "one", "two", "three"];
const last = arr[arr.length - 1];

You could use pop but that modifies the array. Instead you can use at and an index, even a negative index, to retrieve values:

const arr = ["zero", "one", "two", "three"];
arr.at(-1); // "three"
arr.at(-2); // "two"
arr.at(0); // "zero"

at is a very little known function but useful, if only for the shorthand syntax!

Recent Features

  • By
    fetch API

    One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, XMLHttpRequest, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for.  We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better.  Our effort to...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Animated Progress Bars Using MooTools: dwProgressBar

    I love progress bars. It's important that I know roughly what percentage of a task is complete. I've created a highly customizable MooTools progress bar class that animates to the desired percentage. The Moo-Generated XHTML This DIV structure is extremely simple and can be controlled...

  • By
    Generate Dojo GFX Drawings from SVG Files

    One of the most awesome parts of the Dojo / Dijit / DojoX family is the amazing GFX library.  GFX lives within the dojox.gfx namespace and provides the foundation of Dojo's charting, drawing, and sketch libraries.  GFX allows you to create vector graphics (SVG, VML...

Discussion

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