Destructuring assignment in JavaScript

Question

As can be seen in the Mozilla changlog for JavaScript 1.7 they have added destructuring assignment. Sadly I'm not very fond of the syntax (why write a and b twice?):

var a, b;  
[a, b] = f();

Something like this would have been a lot better:

var [a, b] = f();

That would still be backwards compatible. Python-like destructuring would not be backwards compatible.

Anyway the best solution for JavaScript 1.5 that I have been able to come up with is:

function assign(array, map) {
    var o = Object();
    var i = 0;
    $.each(map, function(e, _) {
        o[e] = array[i++];
    });
    return o;
}

Which works like:

var array = [1,2];
var _ = assign[array, { var1: null, var2: null });
_.var1; // prints 1
_.var2; // prints 2

But this really sucks because _ has no meaning. It's just an empty shell to store the names. But sadly it's needed because JavaScript doesn't have pointers. On the plus side you can assign default values in the case the values are not matched. Also note that this solution doesn't try to slice the array. So you can't do something like {first: 0, rest: 0}. But that could easily be done, if one wanted that behavior.

What is a better solution?

Answer 1

First off, var [a, b] = f() works just fine in JavaScript 1.7 - try it!

Second, you can smooth out the usage syntax slightly using with():

var array = [1,2];
with (assign(array, { var1: null, var2: null }))
{
   var1; // == 1
   var2; // == 2
}

Of course, this won't allow you to modify the values of existing variables, so IMHO it's a whole lot less useful than the JavaScript 1.7 feature. In code I'm writing now, I just return objects directly and reference their members - I'll wait for the 1.7 features to become more widely available.

Answer 2

You don't need the dummy "_" variable. You can directly create "global" variables by using the window object scope:

window["foo"] = "bar";
alert(foo); // Gives "bar"

Here are few more points:

• I wouldn't name this function "assign" because that's too generic a term.
• To more closely resemble JS 1.7 syntax, I'd make the function take the destination as the first argument and the source as the second argument.
• Using an object literal to pass the destination variables is cool but can be confused with JS 1.7 destructuring where the destination is actually an object and not an array. I prefer just using a comma delimited list of variable names as a string.

Here's what I came up with:

function destructure(dest, src) {  
    dest = dest.split(",");  

    for (var i = 0; i < src.length; i++) {  
        window[dest[i]] = src[i];  
    }  
}  

var arr = [42, 66];  

destructure("var1,var2", arr); 

alert(var1); // Gives 42
alert(var2); // Gives 66