Javascript dot notation with variable

Question

Not sure how to word this.

I am trying to use a variable to determine how far to drill into an object to return a value.

var target = "level1.level2.var";
var myObject = {
                    level1: {
                        level2: {
                            var: 'value'
                        }  
                    }
               }
var returnVal = myObject.target;

How could this be done? Clearly this won't work. Is it possible some other way?

I figured I would have to maybe explode the target var and then loop for each level, but thought I'd ask to see if there was any easier way I could be overlooking.

Answer 1

You could use this function:

function get_property_from_target(obj, target){
    var arr = target.split('.');
    for(var i = 0; i < arr.length; i++){
        if(obj)
            obj = obj[arr[i]];
    }
    return obj;
}

Then call it like:

get_property_from_target(myObject, target);

I'd rename the function to something better too.

Also please don't name an objects property var since that is a keyword in Javascript it can be confusing, and I'm not sure that it will always work the way you expect or if it will just cause errors in some browsers.