Combine all ES6 generator values into an array

The ES6 spread operator can be applied to an iterable to combine all its results into one single array. A trivial use case for this is to merge extra elements into an existing array (ie, [...existingArray, 2, 3]).

This usage of the spread can be applied to a Generator to combine all the results of the calls to next() into one array. This serves as syntactic sugar to replace needing to use a for-of loop to do the same operation. Here’s an example (illustrative purposes only, ignore that this is not the best way to solve this problem):

function* evenNumbersGenerator(maxNum) {
  for (let i = 0; i <= maxNum; i += 1) {
    if (i % 2 == 0) {
      yield i;
    }
  }
}

...

const evenNumbersTo100 = [...evenNumbersGenerator(100)];

Side Learning: Generator functions cannot be declared as an arrow function, because they have to be declared as a “non-method function”.

Written on August 9, 2017 by evanbrodie