One of the common tasks in JavaScript is to clone an object. This means creating a new object that has the same properties and values as the original one, without modifying the original object. There are different ways to clone an object in JavaScript, but two of the most popular ones are using the assign function and the spread operator.
The assign function takes one or more source objects and copies their own enumerable properties to a target object. For example, if we have an object called person with name and age properties, we can clone it using assign like this:
let person = {name: "Alice", age: 25};
let clone = Object.assign({}, person);
The first argument of assign is an empty object, which will be the target of the cloning. The second argument is the source object, which will be copied to the target. The result is a new object called clone that has the same properties and values as person.
The spread operator (...) allows us to expand an iterable (such as an array or an object) into individual elements. We can use it to clone an object by creating a new object literal and spreading the original object inside it. For example, using the same person object, we can clone it using the spread operator like this:
let person = {name: "Alice", age: 25}; let clone = {...person};
The result is again a new object called clone that has the same properties and values as person.
Both methods create a shallow clone of the original object, which means that they only copy the top-level properties. If the original object has nested objects or arrays, they will be copied by reference, not by value. This means that modifying the nested objects or arrays in the clone will also affect the original object, and vice versa. To create a deep clone of an object, which copies all the nested objects and arrays by value, we need to use other methods, such as JSON.parse and JSON.stringify, or a library like lodash.
In this blog post, we have learned how to clone an object in JavaScript using the assign function and the spread operator. These are two simple and convenient ways to create a shallow copy of an object without modifying the original one.
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