Removing a last item from the JavaScript array is something that we’ve to do sometimes with our code.

In this article, we’ll look at how to remove the last item from a JavaScript array.

Array.prototype.splice

We can use the JavaScript array’s splice method to remove the last item from the array.

For instance, we can write:

const array = [1, 2, 3]
array.splice(-1, 1)
console.log(array)

We call splice with -1 to remove the last item from the array.

And 1 specifies that remove one item.

Then array is [1, 2] .

Array.prototype.pop

We can call the pop method to remove the last item from the array.

It returns the item that’s been removed.

To use it, we can write:

const array = [1, 2, 3]
const popped = array.pop()
console.log(popped, array)

We call pop on array to remove the last item from array .

And we assigned the removed item to popped .

So popped is 3.

And array is [1, 2] .

Array.prototype.slice

Another array method we can use to remove the last item from an array is the slice method.

It returns an array with the start and end index.

For instance, we can write:

const array = [1, 2, 3]
const newArr = array.slice(0, -1);
console.log(newArr)

We call slice with the start and end index to return an array from the start index to the end index.

The item at the end index isn’t included, but the one in the start is included.

The number -1 means the index of the last item in the array.

Therefore, we get:

[1, 2]

as the value of newArr .

Array.prototype.filter

We can use the array filter method to return an array with items that meet the given condition.

Therefore, we can check if the item is in the last index of the array.

For instance, we can write:

const array = [1, 2, 3]
const newArr = array.filter((element, index) => index < array.length - 1);
console.log(newArr)

We pass in a callback to the filter method that returns index < array.length — 1 to return all the items with index less than array.length — 1 .

Therefore, we’ll get the same result for newArr as the previous example.

Conclusion

We can use JavaScript array methods to remove the last item from an array.