How to get object length

javascript json object
Larry Cinnabar picture Larry Cinnabar · Apr 4, 2011 · Viewed 555.2k times · Source

Is there any built-in function that can return the length of an object?

For example, I have a = { 'a':1,'b':2,'c':3 } which should return 3. If I use a.length it returns undefined.

It could be a simple loop function, but I'd like to know if there's a built-in function?

There is a related question (Length of a JSON object) - in the chosen answer the user advises to transform object into an array, which is not pretty comfortable for my task.

Answer

David Tang picture David Tang · Apr 4, 2011

For browsers supporting Object.keys() you can simply do:

Object.keys(a).length;

Otherwise (notably in IE < 9), you can loop through the object yourself with a for (x in y) loop:

var count = 0;
var i;

for (i in a) {
    if (a.hasOwnProperty(i)) {
        count++;
    }
}

The hasOwnProperty is there to make sure that you're only counting properties from the object literal, and not properties it "inherits" from its prototype.

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