How to Swap two Array Elements in JavaScript

Updated on by Alan Morel @AlanMorelX
How to Swap two Array Elements in JavaScript

Arrays are a useful data structure for storing a collection of data in a single variable.

Sometimes you want to be able to switch around the positions of two elements in an array.

In this post, we'll learn how you can swap the position of two elements in an array in JavaScript.

How to swap two elements in an array

Let's start off with an example array:

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

This is a basic 5-element array. Now let's try and swap the 2nd and 4th elements in the array.

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

const temp = array[1];
array[1] = array[3];
array[3] = temp;

console.log(array);

	[1, 4, 3, 2, 5]

In this case, we are using a temporary variable to store the value of the element we want to swap.

Then we perform the swap, and place the temporary variable back into the array.

Conclusion

In this post, we learned how to swap the positions of two elements of an array.

Simply use a temporary variable to hold the value of one of the two elements, perform the swap, then restore the value in the other slot.

Thanks for reading and happy coding!