I have a snippet of code that calls a separate util.js file to grab a given text file and read it and create an array from its contents:

function getDataFromTxt(fullFilePath) {
  //gets a list from a txt file and returns 1 array
  const myRequest = new Request(fullFilePath);
  var toReturn;

  fetch(myRequest)
      .then((response) => {
          if (!response.ok) {
              throw new Error(`HTTP error, status = ${response.status}`);
          }
          return response.text();
    })
    .then((text) => {
      toReturn = text;
      toReturn = toReturn.split("r");
      for (let i = 0; i < toReturn.length; i++){
          toReturn[i] = toReturn[i].replace('n','');
      }
      console.log(toReturn);
      return toReturn;
    })
    .catch((error) => {
      toReturn = `Error: ${error.message}`;
    });
}

However, when its called, the order of operations of what is going on really has me confused…

console.log("before");
this.patrolArray = getDataFromTxt(textFile);
console.log("after");

This results in the console spitting out:

before
after
<array>

Am I having a brain fart here or is something going on that I’m not expecting. I am relatively new to JS so apologies if this is a dumb question.