Question

I have and object literal that is essentially a tree that does not have a fixed number of levels. How can I go about searching the tree for a particualy node and then return that node when found in an effcient manner in javascript?

Essentially I have a tree like this and would like to find the node with the title ‘randomNode_1’

var data = [
{
title: 'topNode',
 children: [
   {
       title: 'node1',
       children: [
       {
           title: 'randomNode_1'
       },
       {   
           title: 'node2',
           children: [
           {
               title: 'randomNode_2',
               children:[
               {   
                   title: 'node2',
                   children: [
                   {
                       title: 'randomNode_3',
                   }]
               }
               ]
           }]
       }]
   }
  ]
 }];

Answer 1

Basing this answer off of @Ravindra’s answer, but with true recursion.

function searchTree(element, matchingTitle){
     if(element.title == matchingTitle){
          return element;
     }else if (element.children != null){
          var i;
          var result = null;
          for(i=0; result == null && i < element.children.length; i++){
               result = searchTree(element.children[i], matchingTitle);
          }
          return result;
     }
     return null;
}

Then you could call it:

var element = data[0];
var result = searchTree(element, 'randomNode_1');