How to remove a specific item from an array in JavaScript

The easiest way to remove a specific item from the JavaScript array is the splice method.

General approach

First, start by locating the item you’d like to delete.

const arr = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];

const itemToRemove = 2;
const indexOfTheItemToRemove = array.indexOf(itemToRemove);

Now you can use splice to remove the element from the array.

arr.splice(indexOfTheItemToRemove, 1);

There are 2 possible corner cases, that you should handle carefully.

A missing item

First, the item you’re looking for may not be present in the array. In this case indexOfTheItemToRemove will equal -1 and there’s no reason to splice the array.

We can rephrase that and say that it only makes sense to splice the array when the indexOfTheItemToRemove is greater than -1

if (indexOfTheItemToRemove > -1) {
  arr.splice(indexOfTheItemToRemove, 1);
}

Multiple matching items

Second, the array may contain multiple items equal to the itemToRemove.

If you want to delete only the first one, then you’re perfectly fine as the code above will just delete the very first occurrence of the itemToRemove.

But, if your goal is to remove all the matching elements from the array, then I suggest using the filter function.

const filteredArray = arr.filter(item => item !== itemToRemove);

Keep in mind that filter returns a new array which we store in the filteredArray constant.

The filter function does not modify the original array.