Discussion on: Destructuring Assignment in ES6- Arrays

Tank you for posting, didn't know about this way of skipping elements.

But the following sentence might be misleading (if it wouldn't be for the headline above):

What if we want to get the first and last item on the array...?

The way you show is really only working if you know the size of the array, which obviously you don't always do, e.g. when destructing an argument inside a function.

If you don't know it, you could do the following without touching the initial array:

const input = ["Hello", "I" , "am", "Sarah"];
const [greeting, ...rest] = input;
//rest == ["I" , "am", "Sarah"]
const name = rest.pop(); // rest is modified but input isn't
//or if you prefer or need more then one from the end
const [last, secondLast] = rest.reverse(); // rest is modified!

The ...name must always be the last part, so const [greeting, ...dontCare, name] = ... does not work.

We should also mention how destructing works when encountering [] and undefined:

var [a, b, ...rest] = [];
console.log(a,b,rest);//undefined, undefined, []

var [ouch] = undefined;//Uncaught TypeError: undefined is not iterable

Hm, iterable? What happens if we destruct some other iterable?

var [a, b, ...rest] = "abc,d";
console.log(a, b, rest);//"a", "b", ["c", ",", "d"]

Happy coding!