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Create an array with same element repeated multiple times

Asked 2012-09-19T21:26:23.487
674

In Python, where [2] is a list, the following code gives this output:

[2] * 5 # Outputs: [2,2,2,2,2]

Does there exist an easy way to do this with an array in JavaScript?

I wrote the following function to do it, but is there something shorter or better?

var repeatelem = function(elem, n){
    // returns an array with element elem repeated n times.
    var arr = [];

    for (var i = 0; i <= n; i++) {
        arr = arr.concat(elem);
    };

    return arr;
};
javascript arrays repeat
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72

You can do it like this:

function fillArray(value, len) {
  if (len == 0) return [];
  var a = [value];
  while (a.length * 2 <= len) a = a.concat(a);
  if (a.length < len) a = a.concat(a.slice(0, len - a.length));
  return a;
}

It doubles the array in each iteration, so it can create a really large array with few iterations.

Note: You can also improve your function a lot by using push instead of concat, as concat will create a new array each iteration. Like this (shown just as an example of how you can work with arrays):

function fillArray(value, len) {
  var arr = [];
  for (var i = 0; i < len; i++) {
    arr.push(value);
  }
  return arr;
}
answered 2012-09-19T21:34:12.933

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