JavaScript arrays are fundamental data structures that allow you to store and manipulate collections of elements efficiently.

While working with arrays, you’ll often need to know their length. The length of an array tells us how many elements are present in the array. You can use this to check if an array is empty and, if not, iterate through the elements in it.

How to Find the Length of an Array

Using the <.length> property

Javascript has a <.length> property that returns the size of an array as a number(integer).

Here’s an example of how to use it:

let numbers = [12,13,14,25]
let numberSize = numbers.length
console.log(numberSize)
# Output
# 4

In the above code, a variable with the name numbers stores an array of numbers, while the variable numberSize stores the number of elements present in the array by using the method .length. The number size is then printed using console.log – hence the output 4.

Let’s now check to see what the data type of the length property is:

let numbers = [12,13,14,25]
let numberSize = numbers.length
console.log(typeof numberSize)
# Output
# number

In the above code we see that the output is number.

Here’s an example of how to access an array element with the length property in a for loop:

let numbers = [12,13,14,25]
for (i = 0; i < numbers.length; i++){
   console.log(numbers[i]);
}
# Output
# 12
# 13
# 14
# 25

Without Using the .length() method

In this method, we will iterate through the elements and count each of the elements present in the array.

Here’s how it works:

function arrayLength(arr) {
   let count = 0;
   for (const element of arr) {
     count++;
   }

   return count; 
}
let numbers = [12,13,14,25]
console.log("Length of array:", arrayLength(numbers));
# Output
# Length of array: 4

In the above code, there’s a function named arrayLength that accepts the array as input. We created a variable called count that is assigned 0. The count variable will store the count of the number of elements in the array.

To count the elements in the array, we used a for-of loop to check each element in the array.

The code iterates over each element in the array until undefined is encountered. That is, we iterate over each element in the array until we reach the end of the array where there are no more elements to check. Finally we return count as the output.

We pass in the variable <numbers> as the input to the function in order to obtain the length of the array as the returned value.

Conclusion

The most common and straightforward method is to use the length property of the array. But you can also use a longer method by looping through the array. These methods allow you to work with arrays of different sizes and types.

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