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
    CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?

    How is it possible that JavaScript-based animation has secretly always been as fast — or faster — than CSS transitions? And, how is it possible that Adobe and Google consistently release media-rich mobile sites that rival the performance of native apps? This article serves as a point-by-point...

  • By
    How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam

    I love almost every part of being a tech blogger:  learning, preaching, bantering, researching.  The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe:  dealing with SPAM comments.  For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day.  PER DAY.  Bloating my database...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools History Plugin

    One of the reasons I love AJAX technology so much is because it allows us to avoid unnecessary page loads.  Why download the header, footer, and other static data multiple times if that specific data never changes?  It's a waste of time, processing, and bandwidth.  Unfortunately...

  • By
    FileReader API

    As broadband speed continues to get faster, the web continues to be more media-centric.  Sometimes that can be good (Netflix, other streaming services), sometimes that can be bad (wanting to read a news article but it has an accompanying useless video with it).  And every social service does...

Discussion

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