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
    Send Text Messages with PHP

    Kids these days, I tell ya.  All they care about is the technology.  The video games.  The bottled water.  Oh, and the texting, always the texting.  Back in my day, all we had was...OK, I had all of these things too.  But I still don't get...

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Editable Content Using MooTools 1.2, PHP, and MySQL

    Everybody and their aerobics instructor wants to be able to edit their own website these days. And why wouldn't they? I mean, they have a $500 budget, no HTML/CSS experience, and extraordinary expectations. Enough ranting though. Having a website that allows for...

  • By
    Web Notifications API

    Every UI framework has the same set of widgets which have become almost essential to modern sites: modals, tooltips, button varieties, and notifications.  One problem I find is each site having their own widget colors, styles, and more -- users don't get a consistent experience.  Apparently the...

Discussion

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