Reducing Arrays

Problem

You have an array of objects and want to reduce them to a value, similar to Ruby’s reduce() and reduceRight().

Solution

You can simply use Array’s reduce() and reduceRight() methods along with an anonymous function, keeping the code clean and readable. The reduction may be something simple such as using the + operator with numbers or strings.

[1,2,3,4].reduce (x,y) -> x + y
# => 10

["words", "of", "bunch", "A"].reduceRight (x, y) -> x + " " + y
# => 'A bunch of words'

Or it may be something more complex such as aggregating elements from a list into a combined object.

people = [
    { name: 'alec', age: 10 }
    { name: 'bert', age: 16 }
    { name: 'chad', age: 17 }
]

people.reduce (x, y) ->
    x[y.name]= y.age
    x
, {}
# => { alec: 10, bert: 16, chad: 17 }

Discussion

Javascript introduced reduce and reduceRight in version 1.8. Coffeescript provides a natural and simple way to express anonymous functions. Both go together cleanly in the problem of merging a collection’s items into a combined result.