What is the Difference Between React Fragment & Array and When to Use

React Fragment and Arrays are both ways of grouping multiple elements together & both allow to render multiple components in React, but they have different use cases and behavior and work slightly differently.

So let's start todays lession and learn something about fragment vs react with real works examples-

Table of Contents

  1. React Fragment with Example
  2. React Array with Example
  3. When to use them

React Fragment with Example

A React Fragment is a lightweight syntax for grouping a list of children without creating an additional DOM element. It allows us to group elements without adding extra nodes to the DOM. We can think of a fragment as a wrapper that doesn't actually render anything, but just groups together the children components. You can learn more about React Fragments here.

Let's say we have a component that returns two child components, but we don't want to add any extra markup to our HTML. We could use a fragment to group them together like this:

function MyComponent() {
  return (
    <>
      <ChildComponent1 />
      <ChildComponent2 />
    </>
  );
}

This will return both child components as if they were wrapped in a single parent element, but without adding any extra markup to the HTML.

React Array with Example

On the other hand, an array is just a collection of elements that we can map over and render individually. You can learn more about React Arrays here.

Let's say we have an array of data that we want to render as a list of components. We could use an array and map over the data like this:

function MyComponent({ data }) {
  return (
    <div>
      {data.map((item) => (
        <ListItem key={item.id} item={item} />
      ))}
    </div>
  );
}

This will map over the data array and render a ListItem component for each item in the array.

Note that, when using array to iterate we have to use a key for each individual item.

When to use them

We should use a fragment when we want to group multiple components together without creating a new DOM node. This is useful when we want to return multiple components from a single function or when we want to avoid adding unnecessary markup to our HTML. Arrays, on the other hand, are useful when we want to map over a list of elements and render them individually.

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