The Spread Operator and Some Uses
The spread operator has several different applications and can be a useful tool to know while working in JavaScript. I learned about and used it throughout my time at Flatiron Schools coding Bootcamp. I will go over examples and use cases of the spread operator. First, a note: the syntax in JavaScript for it is ‘…’
Creating Copies
The spread operator is a great way to create a copy you can easily create a copy of an array or an object. Also editing or changing this copy will not affect the original. In code, it would look like this for an array
Similarly for an object
Merging
Like coping merging is another case where the spread operator is useful. We can merge two arrays together and the code is simple and easy, the same goal can be achieved using concat, however, the spread operator is more useful in that you can add values before and after the object being spread easily. I can explain better with the below example of code.
While we could’ve easily used concat to merge start and end we couldn’t easily add in the 6, 7 values like we were with the spread operator.
Destructuring
The spread operator can also be used for destructuring if we wanted to destructor out an array or object. If we wanted to destructure and keep some parts of the object or array grouped together. Again this can be better visualized or shown in code.
Function Arguments
The spread operator can also be used to pass arguments into functions. If we want to pass an array as an argument into a function the spread operator gives us the ability to do this, like with the Math.max or Math.min that requires a list of numbers to be passed in as arguments our spread operator can make an array be passed in as a list. It also works similarly for functions that we write Math.max or Math.min provide a good illustration for how this works.
Listed above is just a few use cases of the spread operator with simple examples to illustrate how it works.
