Cycling through an array using the comma operator

The comma operator in JavaScript was a long time a mystery to me but once I started using it I found it can be handy in certain situations. In this example, picking the next color out of the available six.

var colorIndex = 0
var colors = ["ff0000", "008000", "ff0086", "a2ff00", "0000ff", "800080"]
function selectNextColor(){
  return colors[colorIndex++] || colors[colorIndex = 0, colorIndex++]
}

So, what’s this all about:

return colors[colorIndex++] || colors[colorIndex = 0, colorIndex++]

If the current index exists in the array, use it. If not, reset the index to 0, then grab the current index (which is now 0), and use that. The mystery of the comma operator is that only the last value, colorIndex++, gets returned to the array and I’m using the first expression to perform an assignment – colorIndex = 0.