I am utterly confused by the filter syntax and what the purpose of boolean is? I’ve read the provided links and tried to find other sources, but no luck. I am a beginner, so any insight is helpful!
.filter
allows you to get the elements of an array that satisfy a particular condition. Suppose you have an array of numbers from 1 to 10, and you only want the numbers that are greater than 4. You can use .filter
to do that:
var nums = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10];
var greaterThan4 = nums.filter(function(num) {
return num > 4;
});
console.log(greaterThan4); // [5,6,7,8,9,10]
You’ll provide a function with at least one parameter (num
) that should return true
for the elements that you want to keep. Here, because we want to keep all numbers that are greater than 4, we provide a function that checks if a value is greater than 4.
Basically, if the function you provide to .filter
returns true
for a particular element in the array, that element is retained.
In JavaScript, it turns out, there are only a handful of values that become false
when coerced to boolean (the so-called falsy values). Everything else coerce to true
(the truthy values). You can use the Boolean
object to coerce any value to true
or false
.
var x = Boolean(3);
var y = Boolean('hello');
var z = Boolean(null);
console.log(x); // true
console.log(y); // true
console.log(z): // false (because `null` is one of the falsy values)
Now try and combine these two to make a function that removes all falsy values from an array.
Does it matter what the parameter in the function is? I’m confused because “num” is never defined so I don’t understand how you come up with what to put in the function and how that part works. Thank you!
That parameter represents any element in the array, and you can name it anything you want. In the example above I chose to name it num
because that parameter represents a number. It can be any valid name, really.