Given a nested object like this:
var cars = {
"bentley": {
"suppliers": [
{
"location": "England",
"name": "Sheffield Mines"}
]
// ...
}
};
and an array like this ["bentley", "suppliers", "0", "name"]
, is there an existing function that will pluck the deepest element, i.e. pluck_innards(cars, ['bentley', "suppliers", "0", "name"])
and that returns "Sheffield Mines".
In other words, is there a function (which I will name deep_pluck
) where
deep_pluck(cars, ['bentley', 'suppliers', '0', 'name'])
=== cars['bentley']['suppliers']['0']['name']
It seems to me that this is simple, yet common enough, to have probably been done in one of the Javascript utility libraries such as jQuery or lo-dash/underscore - but I have not seen it.
My thought is something trivial, along the lines of:
function deep_pluck(array, identities) {
var this_id = identities.shift();
if (identities.length > 0) {
return deep_pluck(array[this_id], identities);
}
return array[this_id];
}
Which I have posted on jsFiddle.
It would be helpful of course if the function were smart enough to identify when numerical indexes in arrays are needed. I am not sure offhand what other caveats may be a concern.
This is all a fairly long question for something I imagine has already been cleverly solved, but I thought to post this as I would interested in seeing what solutions are out there.
I don't think you'll have problems with Array indexes if you pass them as number 0
.
Here's alternative version of your function without recursion:
function deep_pluck(object, identities) {
var result = object;
for(var i = 0; i < identities.length; i++) {
result = result[identities[i]];
}
return result;
}
Working example here: http://jsfiddle.net/AmH2w/1/
dotty.get(obj, pathspec) does it, accepting either an array or a dotted string as the pathspec.
Dotty is open source, and also has an exists method, and a putter.
The methodology is recursion and very similar to your idea, except that dotty includes a test for null/undefined objects so that it doesn't throw exceptions for trying to access an element of something that doesn't exist.
The dotty.get() source from the docs is posted below:
var get = module.exports.get = function get(object, path) {
if (typeof path === "string") {
path = path.split(".");
}
if (!(path instanceof Array) || path.length === 0) {
return;
}
path = path.slice();
var key = path.shift();
if (typeof object !== "object" || object === null) {
return;
}
if (path.length === 0) {
return object[key];
}
if (path.length) {
return get(object[key], path);
}
};
Although not a generic library, it seems that CasperJS has something of this kind with its utils.getPropertyPath
function.
/**
* Retrieves the value of an Object foreign property using a dot-separated
* path string.
*
* Beware, this function doesn't handle object key names containing a dot.
*
* @param Object obj The source object
* @param String path Dot separated path, eg. "x.y.z"
*/
function getPropertyPath(obj, path) {
if (!isObject(obj) || !isString(path)) {
return undefined;
}
var value = obj;
path.split('.').forEach(function(property) {
if (typeof value === "object" && property in value) {
value = value[property];
} else {
value = undefined;
}
});
return value;
}
Edit:
I have come across implementations to solve this a couple times since, including:
- the getObject plugin by Ben Alman (on Github).
- one I rolled - see gist
Edit (2014)
I would also note the relatively new lodash.deep
.
Here's a short ES6 implementation using reduce
:
function get(obj, keyPath) {
return keyPath
.split(".")
.reduce((prev, curr) => prev[curr], obj);
}
Usage:
get(cars, "bentley.suppliers.0.name") // -> "Sheffield Mines"