General - Need tips for reading bracket notations in complex multi-dimensional arrays

JavaScript
1

Hello, its me again.

I’m having trouble wrapping my head on how to read the bracket notations and identifying the levels without editing the code for my ease of understanding/reading. I get that every time a new array is nested within another array, it’s indented - (it’s just a lot of brackets to read/understand from looking at it).

Using the exercise example (with my /**/ comments) for reference:

let nestedArray = [  /*LEVEL 1*/
/* LEVEL 2 - index 0 \*/
  ['deep'],
  [
/* LEVEL 3 - index 1 */
    ['deeper'], ['deeper'] 
  ],
/* LEVEL 4 - index 2 */
  [
    [
      ['deepest'], ['deepest']
    ],
    [
      [
        ['deepest-est?'] /*LEVEL 5 - nestedArray[2][1][0][0][0] */
      ]
    ]
  ]
];

It wasn’t until I condensed it (see code below), was I able to understand that nestedArray[2][1][0][0][0] = ‘deepest-est?’

let nestedArray = [/*LEVEL 1*/
/* index 0 */
  ['deep'], 
/* index 1 */
  [ ['deeper'], ['deeper'] ],  
/* index 2 */
  [ [ ['deepest'], ['deepest'] ], [ [ ['deepest-est?'] ] ] ]
];

Do you guys have personal tips/tricks for making it easier to read the bracket notations for levels without having to edit the code as i did?? Or is it just something you just eventually pick up with time? How often will we see this if we were in real-life production?

2

Nesting this deeply and so arbitrarily in an array is kind of absurd, and since there’s no context to the data it’s hard to grok. I think the point of this lesson is to show you that you can access items of arbitrary depth.

I think it’s fair to say that generally in the real world you’ll be working with arrays of uniform depth. Like, say a list of coordinates or something like that.

1 Like
3

This very much eases my mind, but also a slap in the face, since I spent too much time on this exercise lol. THANK YOU for clarifying!