The JavaScript Reduce Method Explained

Introduction

Reduce is a method that can be difficult to understand especially with all the vague explanations that can be found on the web. There are a lot of benefits to understanding reduce as it is often used in state management (think Redux).

The signature for the reduce array method in JavaScript is:

arr.reduce(callback, initialValue);

Terminology

Reduce comes with some terminology such as reducer & accumulator. The accumulator is the value that we end with and the reducer is what action we will perform in order to get to one value.

You must remember that a reducer will only return one value and one value only hence the name reduce.

Take the following classic example:

const value = 0; 

const numbers = [5, 10, 15];

for(let i = 0; i < numbers.length; i++) {
  value += numbers[i];
}

The above will give us 30 (5 + 10 + 15). This works just fine, but we can do this with reduce instead which will save us from mutating our value variable.

The below code will also output 30, but will not mutate our value variable (which we have now called initialValue)

/* this is our initial value i.e. the starting point*/
const initialValue = 0;

/* numbers array */
const numbers = [5, 10, 15];

/* reducer method that takes in the accumulator and next item */
const reducer = (accumulator, item) => {
  return accumulator + item;
};

/* we give the reduce method our reducer function
  and our initial value */
const total = numbers.reduce(reducer, initialValue)

The above code may look a little confusing, but under the hood there is no magic going on. Let’s add a console.log in our reducer method that will output the accumulator and the item arguments.

The following screenshot shows what’s logged to the console:

So the first thing we notice is our method is called 3 times because there are 3 values in our array. Our accumulator begins at 0 which is our initialValue we passed to reduce. On each call to the function the item is added to the accumulator. The final call to the method has the accumulator value of 15 and item is 15, 15 + 15 gives us 30 which is our final value. Remember the reducer method returns the accumulator plus the item.

So that is a simple example of how you would use reduce, now let’s dive into more a complicated example.

Flattening an Array Using Reduce

Let’s say we have the following array:

const numArray = [1, 2, [3, 10, [11, 12]], [1, 2, [3, 4]], 5, 6];

And let’s say for some crazy reason, JavaScript has removed the .flat method so we have to flatten this array ourselves.

So we’ll write a function to flatten any array no matter how deeply nested the arrays are:

function flattenArray(data) {
  // our initial value this time is a blank array
  const initialValue = [];

  // call reduce on our data
  return data.reduce((total, value) => {
    // if the value is an array then recursively call reduce
    // if the value is not an array then just concat our value
    return total.concat(Array.isArray(value) ? flattenArray(value) : value);
  }, initialValue);
}

If we pass our numArray to this method and log the result we get the following:

This is a great example on how we can make a very common operation quite simple.

Let’s go over one more example.

Final Example - Changing an Object Structure

So with the new Pokemon game coming out, let’s pretend we have a server that sends us an array of Pokemon objects like so:

const pokemon = [
  { name: "charmander", type: "fire" },
  { name: "squirtle", type: "water" },
  { name: "bulbasaur", type: "grass" }
]

We want to change this object to look like:

const pokemonModified = {
  charmander: { type: "fire" },
  squirtle: { type: "water" },
  bulbasaur: { type: "grass" }
};

To get to that desired output we do the following:

const getMapFromArray = data =>
  data.reduce((acc, item) => {
    // add object key to our object i.e. charmander: { type: 'water' }
    acc[item.name] = { type: item.type };
    return acc;
  }, {});

If we call our method like so:

getMapFromArray(pokemon)

We get our desired output:

You can check out the Codesandbox here.

Conclusion

At first sight, the reduce looks more complex than other JavaScript Array Iteration Methods like map and filter, but once the syntax, core concepts and use-cases are understood it can be another powerful tool for JavaScript developers.