JavaScript: Reverse Arrays

By  on  

Manipulating data is core to any programming language. JavaScript is no exception, especially as JSON has token over as a prime data delivery format. One such data manipulation is reversing arrays. You may want to reverse an array to show most recent transactions, or simple alphabetic sorting.

Reversing arrays with JavaScript originally was done via reverse but that would mutate the original array:

// First value:
const arr = ['hi', 'low', 'ahhh'];

// Reverse it without reassigning:
arr.reverse();

// Value:
arr (3) ['ahhh', 'low', 'hi']

Modifying the original array is a legacy methodology. To avoid this mutation, we'd copy the array and then reverse it:

const reversed = [...arr].reverse();

These days we can use toReversed to avoid mutating the original array:

const arr = ['hi', 'low', 'ahhh'];
const reversed = arr.toReversed(); // (3) ['ahhh', 'low', 'hi'];
arr; // ['hi', 'low', 'ahhh']

Avoiding mutation of data objects is incredibly important in a programming language like JavaScript where object references are meaningful.

Recent Features

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

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