Finding elements in Arrays and TypedArrays

Published · Tagged with ECMAScript

Finding elements from the beginning #

Finding an element that satisfies some condition in an Array is a common task and is done with the find and findIndex methods on Array.prototype and the various TypedArray prototypes. Array.prototype.find takes a predicate and returns the first element in the array for which that predicate returns true. If the predicate doesn't return true for any element, the method returns undefined.

const inputArray = [{v:1}, {v:2}, {v:3}, {v:4}, {v:5}];
inputArray.find((element) => element.v % 2 === 0);
// → {v:2}
inputArray.find((element) => element.v % 7 === 0);
// → undefined

Array.prototype.findIndex works similarly, except it returns the index when found, and -1 when not found. The TypedArray versions of find and findIndex work exactly the same, with the only difference being that they operate on TypedArray instances instead of Array instances.

inputArray.findIndex((element) => element.v % 2 === 0);
// → 1
inputArray.findIndex((element) => element.v % 7 === 0);
// → -1

Finding elements from the end #

What if you want to find the last element in the Array? This use case often naturally arises, such as choosing to deduplicate multiple matches in favor of the last element, or knowing ahead of time that the element is likely to be near the end of the Array. With the find method, one solution is to first reverse the input, like so:

inputArray.reverse().find(predicate)

However, that reverses the original inputArray in-place, which is sometimes undesirable.

With the findLast and findLastIndex methods, this use case can be solved directly and ergonomically. They behave exactly as their find and findIndex counterparts, except they start their search from the end of the Array or TypedArray.

const inputArray = [{v:1}, {v:2}, {v:3}, {v:4}, {v:5}];
inputArray.findLast((element) => element.v % 2 === 0);
// → {v:4}
inputArray.findLast((element) => element.v % 7 === 0);
// → undefined
inputArray.findLastIndex((element) => element.v % 2 === 0);
// → 3
inputArray.findLastIndex((element) => element.v % 7 === 0);
// → -1

findLast and findLastIndex support #

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