How to Get Last Item in JS Array

JavaScript allows you to easily store data in arrays. JS arrays are one of the most widely used data structures due to their versatility and supported functions. Often, while working with arrays, you may need to get last item in JS array. In this article, we will learn how to do this.

How to Get Last Item in JS Array

While JS arrays provide many properties and functions, it is surprising that even after so many years of JS development there is no out-of-the-box function to get last element of array. Nevertheless, we will use commonly used approach to solve this problem. Let us say you have the following array.

var arr = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];

Let us say you want to obtain the last item in JS array, that is, 5. Each JS array allows you to access its elements using indexes. It also provides length property that returns the number of elements in array. We will use both these information to calculate the index of last item of array as shown below. We use arr.length to get the number of elements in array. We subtract 1 from it, since array indexes start from 0 for 1st, element, 1 for 2nd element and so on.

arr.length - 1

Once we have the index of last item, we can easily obtain the item as shown below.

arr[arr.length - 1] //returns 5

Modern browsers also support at() function for each array, to return array element at a specific position. We can use -1 index value to obtain the last item of array.