Accessing nested JavaScript objects and arrays by string path

Question

I have a data structure like this :

var someObject = {
    'part1' : {
        'name': 'Part 1',
        'size': '20',
        'qty' : '50'
    },
    'part2' : {
        'name': 'Part 2',
        'size': '15',
        'qty' : '60'
    },
    'part3' : [
        {
            'name': 'Part 3A',
            'size': '10',
            'qty' : '20'
        }, {
            'name': 'Part 3B',
            'size': '5',
            'qty' : '20'
        }, {
            'name': 'Part 3C',
            'size': '7.5',
            'qty' : '20'
        }
    ]
};

And I would like to access the data using these variable :

var part1name = "part1.name";
var part2quantity = "part2.qty";
var part3name1 = "part3[0].name";

part1name should be filled with someObject.part1.name 's value, which is "Part 1". Same thing with part2quantity which filled with 60.

Is there anyway to achieve this with either pure javascript or JQuery?

Answer 1

I just made this based on some similar code I already had, it appears to work:

Object.byString = function(o, s) {
    s = s.replace(/\[(\w+)\]/g, '.$1'); // convert indexes to properties
    s = s.replace(/^\./, '');           // strip a leading dot
    var a = s.split('.');
    for (var i = 0, n = a.length; i < n; ++i) {
        var k = a[i];
        if (k in o) {
            o = o[k];
        } else {
            return;
        }
    }
    return o;
}

Usage::

Object.byString(someObj, 'part3[0].name');

See a working demo at http://jsfiddle.net/alnitak/hEsys/

EDIT some have noticed that this code will throw an error if passed a string where the left-most indexes don't correspond to a correctly nested entry within the object. This is a valid concern, but IMHO best addressed with a try / catch block when calling, rather than having this function silently return undefined for an invalid index.