489780 - New JavaScript Method: create a new method named removeDuplicates() to remove duplicate entries from an array

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: JavaScript Engine, enhancement)

Description

[sdb]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032712 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032712 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.8

Lets say that you have an array of integers or strings.  The array may contain numerous duplicate strings or integers.  Currently to remove those duplicates you would have to code it something like the following.

var test = [1,2,3,1,5,2,1];
test.sort();
for (var i=0; i<test.length; ++i) {
  while (test[i] == test[i+1]) {
    test.splice(i,1);
  }
}
alert(test);

It would be great if you could simplify this procedure by creating a built-in javascript method to provide this feature.

var test = [1,2,3,1,5,2,1];
test = removeDuplicates(test);

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[sdb]

Revised example:

var test = [1,2,3,1,5,2,1];
test.removeDuplicates();

Comment 2

[Paul Biggar]

We don't really do this kind of work, instead it gets done in ECMA (http://www.ecmascript.org/), and we implement their standards.

Comment 3

[Tom S. (please needinfo tschuster)]

We have a lot of old JavaScript feature request, should we really close them?

Comment 4

[Paul Biggar]

I only closed this because it came up in a search and I read it. It seems spending time on closing them probably isn't worth it, but if we've already opened and read the bug, then we may close it too.