How to generate an array of alphabet in jQuery?

Question

In Ruby I can do ('a'..'z').to_a and to get ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', ... 'z'].

Do jQuery or Javascript provide a similar construct?

Answer 1

Personally I think the best is:

alphabet = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'.split('');

Concise, effective, legible, and simple!

EDIT: I have decided, that since my answer is receiving a fair amount of attention to add the functionality to choose specific ranges of letters.

function to_a(c1 = 'a', c2 = 'z') {
    a = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'.split('');
    return (a.slice(a.indexOf(c1), a.indexOf(c2) + 1)); 
}

console.log(to_a('b', 'h'));

Answer 2

A short ES6 version:

const alphabet = [...'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'];
console.log(alphabet);

Answer 3

You can easily make a function to do this for you if you'll need it a lot

function genCharArray(charA, charZ) {
    var a = [], i = charA.charCodeAt(0), j = charZ.charCodeAt(0);
    for (; i <= j; ++i) {
        a.push(String.fromCharCode(i));
    }
    return a;
}
console.log(genCharArray('a', 'z')); // ["a", ..., "z"]