Creating Arrays
We can create a new array with a data literal (i.e., simply typing
out all the elements) or with the special built-in array constructor
function, Array( )
.
The Array Constructor
To
create an array with the
Array( )
constructor, we use the
new
operator followed by the Array
keyword followed by parentheses, which yields an empty
array (one with no elements). We normally assign a newly created
array to a variable or other data container for future reference. For
example:
var myList = new Array( ); // Store an empty array in variable myList
We often want to assign initial values to an array’s elements.
We can do so by passing parameters to the Array(
)
constructor when invoking it. Depending on the
parameters we supply, the constructor invocation has different
effects.
When we supply more than one argument to the Array(
)
constructor or when we supply a single nonnumeric
argument to the Array( )
constructor, each
argument becomes one of the element values in our new array. For
example:
var frameLabels = new Array("intro", "section1", "section2", "home");
The array stored in frameLabels
would have the
following elements:
0: "intro" 1: "section1" 2: "section2" 3: "home"
When we supply exactly one numeric argument to the Array(
)
constructor, it creates an array with the specified
number of empty placeholder elements:
var myList = new Array(14); // Creates an array with 14 empty elements
Arguments passed to the Array( )
constructor can be any legal expression, including compound ...
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