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

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools Clipboard Plugin

    The ability to place content into a user's clipboard can be extremely convenient for the user. Instead of clicking and dragging down what could be a lengthy document, the user can copy the contents of a specific area by a single click of a mouse.

  • By
    Digg-Style Dynamic Share Widget Using the Dojo Toolkit

    I've always seen Digg as a very progressive website. Digg uses experimental, ajaxified methods for comments and mission-critical functions. One nice touch Digg has added to their website is their hover share widget. Here's how to implement that functionality on your site...

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!