Delete Link Object For Free

in this tutorial we are going to tackle a simple JavaScript tip how to delete an element from an array welcome to another tutorial from all things JavaScript where we help bridge the gap between novice and expert the reason we need to talk about deleting elements from an array is that it sometimes is done in a manner that leaves unintended results now it is pretty easy to remove an element from the back or front of an array using pop or shift but what if you want to remove an element in the middle if this is done with the delete command you may not like what you get it is not necessarily wrong to use the delete command but you need to understand what it does I've covered delete in detail in a previous tutorial which I will link to but let's first take a look at that method and then another approach for deleting an element so you may be familiar with delete and that delete is specifically for removing properties on an object not for deleting other things a common mistake made by new users of JavaScript is to try to delete other things such as a variable for example if we had a variable set up here and then we tried to delete that variable in strict mode we're using strict mode here it will give us an error if we didn't have strict mode on it wouldn't give us an error but it wouldn't delete it either nothing would happen so for example here's the air that we get in strict mode delete of an unqualified identifier in strict mode basically what it tells us so it doesn't allow us to do that now we don't receive an error if we use delete on an array let's take a look at that let me set up an array here now if we try to delete say the third element we can do it like this we specify the array and then the position index two for the third element now if we go ahead and save that and take a look at what happens we don't get the air like I said and it deletes the element but notice what our array looks like we now have an empty element this is called a sparse array so it did remove the value in a way and left it empty now I don't particularly like this approach to removing an element from an array and the reason is I like to be deliberate about my values this is not something that I like to see or means anything if I want to leave the length of the array see the array length did not change it's still five because the element is simply empty if I want to leave the length the same but I want to remove the value then I would replace it with a null I want to be deliberate about that value so I would do something like this now if we look at that array we see there is a null value in their null to me means nothing but it's something I assigned so I assigned nothing to it where undefined is something I like to keep as being assigned by JavaScript itself not by me and then empty is really not either one of those but like I said I like to be more deliberate and so that's why I don't like using the delete for removing an element from an array so let's look at a...