How to remove first element of a array in JavaScript

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

Consider we have an array with 3 elements like this.

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

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

Removing the first element

To remove the first element of an array, we can use the built-in shift() method in JavaScript.

Here is an example:

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

fruits.shift();

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

Note: The shift() method also returns the removed element.

Similarly, we can also remove the first element of an array by using the splice() method with 0, 1 as an arguments.

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

fruits.splice(0,1);

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

0 is the start index, 1 is the how many elements we need to remove from the start index.

You can also read, how to remove last element of an array in JavaScript.