You can push multiple elements into an array in the following way
var a = [];
a.push(1, 2, 3);
console.log(a);Push multiple elements to array
Is there a reason JavaScript developers don't use Array.push()? - Stack Overflow
Copy array items into another array
Which is faster in PHP, $array[] = $value or array_push($array, $value)? - Stack Overflow
You can push multiple elements into an array in the following way
var a = [];
a.push(1, 2, 3);
console.log(a);Now in ECMAScript2015 (a.k.a. ES6), you can use the spread operator to append multiple items at once:
var arr = [1];
var newItems = [2, 3];
arr.push(...newItems);
console.log(arr);See Kangax's ES6 compatibility table to see what browsers are compatible
I actually asked myself the same question at the start of this year. UPDATED with new test cases http://jsperf.com/array-push-vs-unshift-vs-direct-assignment/2
It appears that push is much faster in chrome, and about equal in FF. Also direct is faster in IE9, but I would be interested to see how it performs in IE10.
I would say that most developers would assume setting the length of the array, and then using direct assignment is faster, as is the case with most programming languages. But JavaScript is different. Javascript arrays aren't really arrays, they're just key/value maps just like all other JavaScript objects. So the pre-allocation is essentially falling on deaf ears.
Personally I prefer push (:
I believe that it's mostly habit.
Some developers use it simply because it's the way they are used to do it, and haven't considered that push would be an alternative.
Some developers have learned once upon a time that one method is much faster than another, and haven't reviewed this in light of the recent performance improvements of the Javascript engines.
Personally I use push frequently. Most of the time readability and maintainability is more important than performance, at least when the performance impact is small enough. The performance tests posted in the answers here show that the performance difference between various methods isn't very big.
Use the concat function, like so:
var arrayA = [1, 2];
var arrayB = [3, 4];
var newArray = arrayA.concat(arrayB);
The value of newArray will be [1, 2, 3, 4] (arrayA and arrayB remain unchanged; concat creates and returns a new array for the result).
In ECMAScript 6, you can use the Spread syntax:
let arr1 = [0, 1, 2];
let arr2 = [3, 4, 5];
arr1.push(...arr2);
console.log(arr1)Spread syntax is available in all major browsers (that excludes IE11). For the current compatibility, see this (continuously updated) compatibility table.
However, see Jack Giffin's reply below for more comments on performance. It seems concat is still better and faster than the spread operator.
I personally feel like $array[] is cleaner to look at, and honestly splitting hairs over milliseconds is pretty irrelevant unless you plan on appending hundreds of thousands of strings to your array.
I ran this code:
$t = microtime(true);
$array = array();
for($i = 0; $i < 10000; $i++) {
$array[] = $i;
}
print microtime(true) - $t;
print '<br>';
$t = microtime(true);
$array = array();
for($i = 0; $i < 10000; $i++) {
array_push($array, $i);
}
print microtime(true) - $t;
The first method using $array[] is almost 50% faster than the second one.
Some benchmark results:
Run 1
0.0054171085357666 // array_push
0.0028800964355469 // array[]
Run 2
0.0054559707641602 // array_push
0.002892017364502 // array[]
Run 3
0.0055501461029053 // array_push
0.0028610229492188 // array[]
This shouldn't be surprising, as the PHP manual notes this:
If you use array_push() to add one element to the array it's better to use $array[] = because in that way there is no overhead of calling a function.
The way it is phrased I wouldn't be surprised if array_push is more efficient when adding multiple values. Out of curiosity, I did some further testing, and even for a large amount of additions, individual $array[] calls are faster than one big array_push. Interesting.
The main use of array_push() is that you can push multiple values onto the end of the array.
It says in the documentation:
If you use array_push() to add one element to the array it's better to use $array[] = because in that way there is no overhead of calling a function.