JavaScript Array Group

By  on  

Managing, sorting, and manipulating data with JavaScript is a skill we've often delegated to third party libraries like lodash. As the JavaScript language progresses, however, these features eventually get. added to the JavaScript specification. Two such APIs for grouping of Array data are `Array.prototype.group and Array.prototype.groupToMap.

Array.prototype.group

To group an array of objects by a given property, call the group method with function that returns the grouping string:

const teams = [
  { name: "Arsenal", origin: "London", tier: "legendary" },
  { name: "Manchester United", origin: "Manchester", tier: "legendary" },
  { name: "Liverpool", origin: "Liverpool", tier: "legendary" },
  { name: "Newcastle United", origin: "Newcastle", tier: "mid" },
  // Lol, awful club
  { name: "Tottenham", origin: "London", tier: "lol" },
];

const tieredTeams = teams.group(({ tier }) => tier);

The result of the array's group is an object with keys that match the grouping key:

{
  legendary: [
    {name: "Arsenal", origin: "London", tier: "legendary"},
    {name: "Manchester United", origin: "Manchester", tier: "legendary"},
    {name: "Liverpool", origin: "Liverpool", tier: "legendary"}
  ], 
  mid: [
    {name: "Newcastle United", origin: "Newcastle", tier: "mid"}
  ], 
  lol: [
    {name: "Tottenham", origin: "London", tier: "lol"}
  ]
}

Array.prototype.groupToMap

groupToMap returns a Map instance instead of an object literal:

const tieredTeamsMap = teams.group(({ tier }) => tier);

tieredTeamsMap.has('lol') // true

tieredTeamsMap.get('lol') // [{name: "Tottenham", origin: "London", tier: "lol"}]

As of the time of publish, group and groupToMap are only available in Safari. These two methods are crucial to data management moving forward. Whether you're manipulating data on client or server side, these newly added native methods are much welcomed.

Recent Features

  • By
    Introducing MooTools Templated

    One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating: new Element Madness The first way to create UI-driven...

  • By
    How to Create a Twitter Card

    One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook.  Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. The groupToMap() example might have an error – it’s still calling group()

    I didn’t know about these functions though, very useful!

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