Removing elements
So far, you have learned how to add values to the end and at the beginning of an array. Let's take a look at how we can remove a value from an array.
To remove a value from the end of an array, we can use the pop
method:
numbers.pop();
Tip
The push
and pop
methods allow an array to emulate a basic stack
data structure, which is the subject of the next chapter.
The output of our array will be the numbers from -4 to 12. The length of our array is 17.
Removing an element from first position
To remove a value from the beginning of the array, we can use the following code:
for (var i=0; i<numbers.length; i++){ numbers[i] = numbers[i+1]; }
We can represent the previous code using the following diagram:
We shifted all the elements one position to the left. However, the length of the array is still the same (17), meaning we still have an extra element in our array (with an undefined value). The last time the code inside the loop was executed, i+1
was a reference...