I got tired of rewriting .slice() loops — so I made "chonkify", a tiny chunking utility that works with anything

Igor Ushakov — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 16:44:29 +0000

I don’t know how many times I’ve written some version of this:

for (let i = 0; i < data.length; i += chunkSize) {
  chunks.push(data.slice(i, i + chunkSize));
}

It works. But after the 10th time — especially when working with buffers, emoji-heavy strings, or even async streams — I decided it was time to stop repeating myself.

So I built chonkify.

Why?

Because I needed a chunking function that:

✅ Works with:

Arrays
Strings
Buffers
Typed arrays
Sets & Maps
Array-likes
Even AsyncIterable objects

😅 Handles:

Complex Unicode (grapheme clusters like 🏳️‍🌈, 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦)
Multi-codepoint emoji without slicing them in half

💡 Is:

Zero dependencies
~870 bytes (core)
ESM-first and TypeScript-ready

Examples

import { chonkify } from 'chonkify'

for (const chunk of chonkify("👨‍👩‍👧‍👦🎉🎊🍕", 2)) {
  console.log(chunk)
}
// → ["👨‍👩‍👧‍👦", "🎉"], ["🎊", "🍕"]

Or with an async iterable:

for await (const chunk of chonkify(streamOfItems, 100)) {
  await sendBatch(chunk)
}

Try it

npm i chonkify

I mostly built this for myself, but figured someone else might find it useful too.

DEV Community: Igor Ushakov

I got tired of rewriting .slice() loops — so I made "chonkify", a tiny chunking utility that works with anything

Why?

Examples

Try it