Array Chunking

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On several of my side projects, this blog included, I've had to reach for some kind of array chunking code, something that would take a flat array of items and bunch together the items based on some logic frequently based on the number of items I want in each chunk.

While I could probably reach for some _.chunk method, I've always opted to instead write the function locally since it's all of about 10 or 15 lines.

Since I keep on needing this utility, I figured it would be a good exercise to write one and also write about writing one on my blog!

So, without further ado, let's dig in!

Let's start with the problem we're trying to solve, we want to take an array of elements, and would like to return an array of arrays of those items.

Now, we could try and make this super generic to start, but for simplicity sake let's start by trying to create an array chunking function that chunks the array into groups of the same length.

So we have two arguments for our function: array and length, the first is the input array of elements, and the second is the desired chunk length.

function chunk(array, length) {}

Great, let's dive into the implementation, I think I'll want to reach for reduce for the implementation to manage the chunking for us, so let's get that started in our function: