Accessing

If we want to get the first and second names of a pair, we can use destructuring. Destructuring a tuple allows us to give names to the elements inside the tuple:

const friends = ["Alice", "Bob"];

const [alice, bob] = friends;

That single definition actually introduces in the current scope two constants, alice and bob. Alternatively, if we still want to give a meaningful name to a useless component, we can use a silent variable for it, by prefixing it with _:

const [alice2, _bob] = friends;

Note how we renamed alice as alice2 in order to avoid a collision (redefinition) with previous one in the same top-level scope.

We can destructure nested tuples in the same manner:

const deep = [1, [2n, "Hello"]];

const [_x, [_y, greeting]] = deep; // greeting == "Hello"

This works well if we want to give a name to a component (like greeting above), but we might simply want the value of a component without naming it. In that case, we use the binary operator []:

const film = deep[1][1] + ", Dolly!" // film == "Hello, Dolly!"

The first component has index 0, the second 1 etc.