Javascript - removing undefined fields from an obj

Question

This question already has answers here:

Remove blank attributes from an Object in Javascript (31 answers)

Closed 2 years ago.

Is there a clean way to remove undefined fields from an object?

i.e.

> var obj = { a: 1, b: undefined, c: 3 }
> removeUndefined(obj)
{ a: 1, c: 3 }

I came across two solutions:

_.each(query, function removeUndefined(value, key) {
  if (_.isUndefined(value)) {
    delete query[key];
  }
});

or:

_.omit(obj, _.filter(_.keys(obj), function(key) { return _.isUndefined(obj[key]) }))

Answer 1

This one is easy to remember, but might be slow. Use jQuery to copy non-null properties to an empty object. No deep copy unless you add true as first argument.

myObj = $.extend({}, myObj);

Answer 2

Mhh.. I think @Damian asks for remove undefined field (property) from an JS object. Then, I would simply do :

for (const i in myObj)  
   if (typeof myObj[i] === 'undefined')   
     delete myObj[i]; 

Short and efficient solution, in (vanilla) JS ! Example :

const myObj = {
  a: 1,
  b: undefined,
  c: null, 
  d: 'hello world'
};

for (const i in myObj)  
  if (typeof myObj[i] === 'undefined')   
    delete myObj[i]; 

console.log(myObj);

Answer 3

A one-liner using ES6 arrow function and ternary operator:

Object.keys(obj).forEach(key => obj[key] === undefined ? delete obj[key] : {});

Or use short-circuit evaluation instead of ternary: (@Matt Langlois, thanks for the info!)

Object.keys(obj).forEach(key => obj[key] === undefined && delete obj[key])

jsbin

Same example using if expression:

Object.keys(obj).forEach(key => {
  if (obj[key] === undefined) {
    delete obj[key];
  }
});

If you want to remove the items from nested objects as well, you can use a recursive function:

const removeEmpty = (obj) => {
  Object.keys(obj).forEach(key => {
    if (obj[key] && typeof obj[key] === 'object') removeEmpty(obj[key]);
    else if (obj[key] === undefined) delete obj[key];
  });
  return obj;
};

jsbin

Answer 4

This solution also avoids hasOwnProperty() as Object.keys returns an array of a given object's own enumerable properties.

Object.keys(obj).forEach(function (key) {
 if(typeof obj[key] === 'undefined'){
    delete obj[key];
  }
});

and you can add this as null or '' for stricter cleaning.

Answer 5

Here's a plain javascript (no library required) solution:

function removeUndefinedProps(obj) {
    for (var prop in obj) {
        if (obj.hasOwnProperty(prop) && obj[prop] === undefined) {
            delete obj[prop];
        }
    }
}

Working demo: http://jsfiddle.net/jfriend00/djj5g5fu/

Answer 6

I prefer to use something like Lodash:

import { pickBy, identity } from 'lodash'

const cleanedObject = pickBy(originalObject, identity)

Note that the identity function is just x => x and its result will be false for all falsy values. So this removes undefined, "", 0, null, ...

If you only want the undefined values removed you can do this:

const cleanedObject = pickBy(originalObject, v => v !== undefined)

It gives you a new object, which is usually preferable over mutating the original object like some of the other answers suggest.