How to remove first and last element from an array in JavaScript

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to remove the first and last element from an array in JavaScript.

Consider we have an array with 3 elements.

const fruits = ["apple", "banana", "grapes"];

Now, we need to remove the first element apple, the last element grapes from the above array.

Using the shift() and pop() methods

To remove the first and last element from an array, we can use the shift() and pop() methods in JavaScript.

Here is an example:

const fruits = ["apple", "banana", "grapes"];

fruits.shift(); // removes first element
fruits.pop(); // removes last element

console.log(fruits); // ["banana"]

The shift() and pop() methods can also return the removed element.

Similarly, we can also use the slice() method by passing 1, -1 as an arguments, slicing starts from index 1 and ends before the last index (-1 represents the last element index).

const fruits = ["apple", "banana", "grapes"];

const sliced = fruits.slice(1,-1)

console.log(sliced); // ["banana"]

Note: The slice() method doesn’t modify the original array instead of it returns the new array with the sliced elements.