Question

I’d like to know if standard JS provides a way of splitting a string straight into a set of variables during their initial declaration. For example in Perl I would use:

my ($a, $b, $c) = split '-', $str;

In Firefox I can write

var [a, b, c] = str.split('-');

But this syntax is not part of the ECMAScript 5th edition and as such breaks in all other browsers. What I’m trying to do is avoid having to write:

var array = str.split('-');
var a = array[0];
var b = array[1];
var c = array[2];

Because for the code that I’m writing at the moment such a method would be a real pain, I’m creating 20 variables from 7 different splits and don’t want to have to use such a verbose method.

Does anyone know of an elegant way to do this?

Answer 1

You can only do it slightly more elegantly by omitting the var keyword for each variable and separating the expressions by commas:

var array = str.split('-'),
    a = array[0], b = array[1], c = array[2];

ES6 standardises destructuring assignment, which allows you to do what Firefox has supported for quite a while now:

var [a, b, c] = str.split('-');

You can check browser support using Kangax’s compatibility table.