Array: Insert an Item at a Specific Index with JavaScript

By  on  

There are many tasks related to arrays that sound quite simple but (1) aren't and (2) aren't required of a developer very often. I was encountered with one such task recently: inserting an item into an existing array at a specific index. Sounds easy and common enough but it took some research to figure it out.

// The original array
var array = ["one", "two", "four"];
// splice(position, numberOfItemsToRemove, item)
array.splice(2, 0, "three");

array;  // ["one", "two", "three", "four"]

If you aren't adverse to extending natives in JavaScript, you could add this method to the Array prototype:

Array.prototype.insert = function (index, item) {
  this.splice(index, 0, item);
};

I've tinkered around quite a bit with arrays, as you may have noticed:

Arrays are super useful -- JavaScript just makes some tasks a bit more ... code-heavy than they need to be. Keep these snippets in your toolbox for the future!

Recent Features

  • 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...

  • By
    6 Things You Didn’t Know About Firefox OS

    Firefox OS is all over the tech news and for good reason:  Mozilla's finally given web developers the platform that they need to create apps the way they've been creating them for years -- with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.  Firefox OS has been rapidly improving...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Implement jQuery’s hover() Method in MooTools

    jQuery offers a quick event shortcut method called hover that accepts two functions that represent mouseover and mouseout actions. Here's how to implement that for MooTools Elements. The MooTools JavaScript We implement hover() which accepts to functions; one will be called on mouseenter and the other...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools ScrollSide

    This post is a proof of concept post -- the functionality is yet to be perfected. Picture this: you've found yourself on a website that uses horizontal scrolling instead of vertical scrolling. It's an artistic site so you accept that the site scrolls left to right.

Discussion

  1. Man, isn’t this JavaScript powerful…

  2. MaxArt

    How about a little step further? Since splice takes an indefinite number of arguments, you can do something like this:

    Array.prototype.insert = function (index) {
      this.splice.apply(this, [index, 0].concat(this.slice.call(arguments, 1)));
    };
    

    so you can do

    array.insert(2, "three", "another three", "the last three");
    array;  // ["one", "two", "three", "another three", "the last three", "four"]
    
  3. Great tip, thanks. I knew this trick before but I forgot that splice could take more than 2 arguments, phew.

  4. Yes, it’s a very useful function. Last year I was delighted to find out that it exists – it made the project I was working on extremely useful.

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