Object.keys

By  on  

I adore JavaScript objects.  Love them.  You're probably asking "well, why don't you marry them?"  Trust me:  if I could, I would.  Arrays are nice and all but object keys provide another level of structure and information that is invaluable.  For example, it's much faster search an object for a key than it is to search an array for value presence.

The way we've always iterated on an Object instance was always a for loops with a hasOwnProperty check which was ugly; Object.keys (not Object.prototype.keys) provides an array of Object properties!

var person = {
  firstName: 'David',
  lastName: 'Walsh',
  // ...
};

Object.keys(person).forEach(function(trait) {
  console.log('Person ', trait,': ', person[trait]);
});

If you work with JSON or simply raw JavaScript objects, and you haven't been using Object.keys, now is the time to ditch the old method for this elegant solution!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Simple Slideshow Using MooTools

    One excellent way to add dynamism to any website is to implement a slideshow featuring images or sliding content. Of course there are numerous slideshow plugins available but many of them can be overkill if you want to do simple slideshow without controls or events.

  • By
    Google-Style Element Fading Using MooTools or jQuery

    Google recently introduced an interesting effect to their homepage: the top left and top right navigation items don't display until you move your mouse or leave the search term box. Why? I can only speculate that they want their homepage as...

Discussion

  1. Franz

    Why don’t you use this:

    for (let trait in person){console.log(trait)}
    • Kay.L

      @Franz,
      for..in iterating over NON own properties.

    • Proqz

      Not very well supported http://caniuse.com/#feat=let

    • Proqz

      Also would iterate over prototype properties.

    • Abis Mal

      The for each...in statement is deprecated as the part of ECMA-357 (E4X) standard. E4X support has been removed, but for each...in will not be disabled and removed because of backward compatibility considerations. Consider using for...of instead. (Please refer to bug 791343.)

  2. Also: Use const, not let. The loop creates a new context in each iteration, the loop variable therefore is constant unless your loop-code changes it.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!