Recursive Array.flat

By  on  

There was much talk about Array.prototype.flat during its early stages, starting with the name alone. Many developers preferred the name flatten but the spec differed from MooTools' implementation. MooTools would recursively flatten an array but the new, official flat implementation defaults one level of flattening,.

The current implementation of Array.prototype.flat is:

[1, 2, [3], [[4]]].flat(/* depth */);
// [1,2,3,[4]]

.flat only flattens arrays to one level by default, but what if you want a truly flattened array? You can use Infinity and flat's depth argument to make that happen:

[1, 2, [3], [[4]], [[[[[[6]]]]]]].flat(Infinity);
// [1,2,3,4,6]

I find the method name a bit misleading but I understand why they went to a single level. The method name smush was thrown around, which would've been the worst method name since stringify!

Recent Features

  • By
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

  • By
    I’m an Impostor

    This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself.  I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life.  All of those feelings were very...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. Array.prototype.flat

    have an argument to specify the depth (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/flat#Parameters):

    [1, 2, [3], [[4]], [[[[[[6]]]]]]].flat(Infinity); // [1,2,3,4,6]

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