Array.prototype.diff(meaCulpa)

Published on 08/23/2014 08:45 PM by Eph Baum

So, it turns out that when you go off all half-cocked all willy-nilly extending a core functionality of JavaScript it’s bound to result in a hiccup now and then.

It was, then, a few days after posting about my new ‘diff’ function that I found my JavaScript choking on exactly that function. It turns out that the issue was that I wasn’t watching my data types carefully enough.

The solution? Simply watch what you’re doing!

Array.prototype.diff = function( a ) { 
  if ( a instanceof Array && this instanceof Array) { 
    return this.filter( function( i ) { 
      return a.indexOf( i ) < 0; 
    }); 
  } else { 
    return new Array(); 
  } 
};

At this point we’re doing the EXACT same thing that we had been doing before except prior to comparing the two arrays, we check to make sure that they are both actually arrays using instanceof, as you can see above.

You’ll see that the else now simply returns an empty array if they’re not both arrays. This solution works for me but you could definitely do quite a bit more with this if you felt it was warranted.

Written by Eph Baum