Question

I have a variable that may contain objects or may be undefined. I wish to add additional objects to this variable. How do I do that?

code example when applicable:

function(){ 
    var comments;
    if(fbposts[fbpost].comments.count){
        for(var comment in fbposts[fbpost].comments.data){
                comments = ({
                    name: fbposts[fbpost].comments.data[comment].from.name,
                    link: "http://www.facebook.com/"+fbposts[fbpost].comments.data[comment].from.id,
                    img: "http://www.facebook.com/"+fbposts[fbpost].comments.data[comment].from.id+"/picture",
                    message: fbposts[fbpost].comments.data[comment].message,
                    created: timeDifference(Date.parse(fbposts[fbpost].comments.data[comment].created_time)),
                })
            }

    }
    return comments;}(),

Answer 1

Test if it is undefined and if so assign it to an empty object:

if (typeof yourVar === "undefined")
    yourVar = {};

yourVar.additionalObject1 = { something : "test" };
yourVar.additionalObject2 = { something : "else" };

EDIT: OK, now that you’ve added code to your question, it seems like your comments variable should be an array, since you are adding to it in a loop. So I think you’d want to do something like this:

(function(){ 
    var comments = [];
    if(fbposts[fbpost].comments.count){
        for(var comment in fbposts[fbpost].comments.data){
                comments.push({
                    name: fbposts[fbpost].comments.data[comment].from.name,
                    link: "http://www.facebook.com/"+fbposts[fbpost].comments.data[comment].from.id,
                    img: "http://www.facebook.com/"+fbposts[fbpost].comments.data[comment].from.id+"/picture",
                    message: fbposts[fbpost].comments.data[comment].message,
                    created: timeDifference(Date.parse(fbposts[fbpost].comments.data[comment].created_time)),
                });
         }    
    }
    return comments;
})();

comments will thus contain one element for each comment in your source data. If there are no comments it will be an empty array. (If you want it to return undefined if there are no comments then leave the variable declaration where it is as var comments and add comments=[]; just inside the if statement.)