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
    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
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos

    David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...

  • By
    HTML5 Placeholder Styling with CSS

    Last week I showed you how you could style selected text with CSS. I've searched for more interesting CSS style properties and found another: INPUT placeholder styling. Let me show you how to style placeholder text within INPUTelements with some unique CSS code. The CSS Firefox...

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!