Many times in JavaScript we have to reach deep into objects to access fields that could possibly not be there at all; for example let’s assume I have a JS object called options into which I’ve just read an entire JSON configuration file. Trying to access a field like options.application.cache.enable directly will potentially fail (e.g. when any of the intermediate levels is missing)…
if (options.application.cache.enable) {
// do stuff
}
…therefore this kind of work will usually involve some kind of testing for the existence of each level, so as to gracefully handle any misbehaving data. Also, many times I’ve seen the following approach used in these scenarios which is quite bad for anything more than a single depth level:
if (options && options.application && ...) {
// do stuff
}
So, just as a little helper, here is a small method that may prove to be quite handy when having to deal with data whose structure we’re not certain of (here’s a proper Gist entry).
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