Recently, while I was pairing with Federico, he wrote some code like this:
const [, personalInfo] = userData;And my reaction was: "You have a rogue comma there!" But no… he left it on purpose!
If you’re familiar with destructuring in JavaScript, you will have figured that userData is an array.
And Federico was trying to get the second element of the array.
Turns out, in JavaScript you can just leave the first space blank.
I would have suggested using an underscore instead, as this is what I'm familiar with from Elixir, for example:
const [_, personalInfo] = userData;But our linter complains about one letter variables. Also, in JavaScript, simply leaving a blank space is a thing! For any position in the array. If you just care about the number 3 and 5, you can do this:
const [,,three,,five] = [1,2,3,4,5];I find that very odd. But then I guess I won't really need to do something like this very often. Also - just because you can do it, it doesn't mean that have to do it that way. It seems a bit hard to understand. On the other hand, if this is idiomatic for JavaScript then I should be using this. I'm undecided… Well, at least next time Federico leaves a rogue comma sitting around, I know what's going on!