Welcome to the Treehouse Community
Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community!
Looking to learn something new?
Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.
Start your free trial
Michael Paccione
9,017 PointsJavascript Arrays Stage 4: Challenge 1 of 4
Challenge task 1 of 4
On line 18, use a method on the 'spareWords' to set 'firstWord' to be first word of the 'spareWords' array whilst simultaneously removing it from the beginning of the array.
I don't understand what this means. Any help?
This is code
var spareWords = ["The","chimney","sweep's","dog"];
var saying = ["quick", "brown", "fox", "jumps", "over", "the", "lazy"];
var firstWord = spareWords;
var lastWord = spareWords;
saying;
saying;
2 Answers
Ken Alger
Treehouse TeacherMichael;
Have you tried
var firstWord = spareWords.shift();
That should do what you are tasked to do.
Ken
Michael Paccione
9,017 PointsYou are correct sir. Thank You!
I think the wording is strange on the instructions. I get the removing it from the beginning of the array - yea that sounds like shift. The set it to be the first word in array I don't really understand so much. How does shift set it to the first word... Is this just a semantics thing?
Jason Anello
Courses Plus Student 94,610 PointsHi Michael,
The instructions want you to do two things. It wants you to remove the string "The" from the beginning of the array and it also wants that string assigned to the variable firstWord
It turns out that the shift() method does 2 things. It removes the first element from an array and it also returns that value. This means that you can assign that return value to a variable. In this case, the return value "The" is being assigned to the firstWord variable.
I hope that helps clear it up for you.
You can read more about the shift() method here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/shift
Ken Alger
Treehouse TeacherMichael;
The shift() method in JavaScript removes the first item of an array, and returns that item, and reduces the length of the array
The unshift() method adds new items to the beginning of an array, and returns the new length, obviously lengthening the array.
Happy coding!
Ken
Russell Beye
3,367 PointsThis is asking you to take spareWords and splice the first word in the array (spareWord[0]) and place it in firstWord.
var firstWord = spareWords.splice(0, 1);
This splices the one element, starting at the 0 position of spareWords, and stores it in the firstWord.
Michael Paccione
9,017 PointsOkay this didn't work in the tutorial because they are looking for the .shift. To be fair your method probably works outside of the tutorial. I dunno I'm new at it so I am not familiar with splice yet.
Jason Anello
Courses Plus Student 94,610 PointsHi Russell,
The splice method doesn't quite work out here. It will correctly change the array but it returns an array of the removed elements.
It will return ["The"] instead of "The"
This means the firstWord variable will not have the correct value.
Russell Beye
3,367 PointsI wasn't familiar with the problem set, and if he needed a string or an array as the returned type. As we showed, there is more than one way to skin a cat. :)
Michael Paccione
9,017 PointsMichael Paccione
9,017 PointsI don't really understand the directions but I thought it wanted me to...
var firstWord = spareWords.unshift('firstWord');