You may have a big list of names you need to filter in order to remove duplicates and sort them alphabetically.

In our example we are going to use the list of JavaScript reserved keywords we can find across the different versions of the language, but as you can notice, there is a lot of duplicated keywords and they are not alphabetically organized. So this is a perfect list (Array) of strings to test out this JavaScript tip.

var keywords = ['do', 'if', 'in', 'for', 'new', 'try', 'var', 'case', 'else', 'enum', 'null', 'this', 'true', 'void', 'with', 'break', 'catch', 'class', 'const', 'false', 'super', 'throw', 'while', 'delete', 'export', 'import', 'return', 'switch', 'typeof', 'default', 'extends', 'finally', 'continue', 'debugger', 'function', 'do', 'if', 'in', 'for', 'int', 'new', 'try', 'var', 'byte', 'case', 'char', 'else', 'enum', 'goto', 'long', 'null', 'this', 'true', 'void', 'with', 'break', 'catch', 'class', 'const', 'false', 'final', 'float', 'short', 'super', 'throw', 'while', 'delete', 'double', 'export', 'import', 'native', 'public', 'return', 'static', 'switch', 'throws', 'typeof', 'boolean', 'default', 'extends', 'finally', 'package', 'private', 'abstract', 'continue', 'debugger', 'function', 'volatile', 'interface', 'protected', 'transient', 'implements', 'instanceof', 'synchronized', 'do', 'if', 'in', 'for', 'let', 'new', 'try', 'var', 'case', 'else', 'enum', 'eval', 'null', 'this', 'true', 'void', 'with', 'break', 'catch', 'class', 'const', 'false', 'super', 'throw', 'while', 'yield', 'delete', 'export', 'import', 'public', 'return', 'static', 'switch', 'typeof', 'default', 'extends', 'finally', 'package', 'private', 'continue', 'debugger', 'function', 'arguments', 'interface', 'protected', 'implements', 'instanceof', 'do', 'if', 'in', 'for', 'let', 'new', 'try', 'var', 'case', 'else', 'enum', 'eval', 'null', 'this', 'true', 'void', 'with', 'await', 'break', 'catch', 'class', 'const', 'false', 'super', 'throw', 'while', 'yield', 'delete', 'export', 'import', 'public', 'return', 'static', 'switch', 'typeof', 'default', 'extends', 'finally', 'package', 'private', 'continue', 'debugger', 'function', 'arguments', 'interface', 'protected', 'implements', 'instanceof'];

Since we don’t want to change our original list, we are going to use a high order function named filter, which will return a new filter array based in a predicate (function) we pass to it. The predicate will compare the index of the current keyword in the original list with its index in the new list and will push it to the new array only if the indexes match.

Finally we are going to sort the filtered list using the sort function which takes a comparison function as the only argument, returning a alphabetically sorted list.

var filteredAndSortedKeywords = keywords
  .filter(function (keyword, index) {
      return keywords.lastIndexOf(keyword) === index;
    })
  .sort(function (a, b) {
      return a < b ? -1 : 1;
    });

The ES6 (ECMAScript 2015) version using arrow functions looks a little simpler:

const filteredAndSortedKeywords = keywords
  .filter((keyword, index) => keywords.lastIndexOf(keyword) === index)
  .sort((a, b) => a < b ? -1 : 1);

And this is the final filtered and sorted list of JavaScript reserved keywords:

console.log(filteredAndSortedKeywords);

// ['abstract', 'arguments', 'await', 'boolean', 'break', 'byte', 'case', 'catch', 'char', 'class', 'const', 'continue', 'debugger', 'default', 'delete', 'do', 'double', 'else', 'enum', 'eval', 'export', 'extends', 'false', 'final', 'finally', 'float', 'for', 'function', 'goto', 'if', 'implements', 'import', 'in', 'instanceof', 'int', 'interface', 'let', 'long', 'native', 'new', 'null', 'package', 'private', 'protected', 'public', 'return', 'short', 'static', 'super', 'switch', 'synchronized', 'this', 'throw', 'throws', 'transient', 'true', 'try', 'typeof', 'var', 'void', 'volatile', 'while', 'with', 'yield']

Thanks to @nikshulipa, @kirilloid, @lesterzone, @tracker1, @manuel_del_pozo for all the comments and suggestions!