Question

I have the following (nested) object:

obj: { subObj: { foo: 'hello world' } };

Next thing I do is to reference the subobject like this:

var s = obj.subObj;

Now what I would like to do is to get a reference to the object obj out of the variable s.
Something like:

var o = s.parent;

Is this somehow possible?

Answer 1

No. There is no way of knowing which object it came from.

s and obj.subObj both simply have references to the same object.

You could also do:

var obj = { subObj: {foo: 'hello world'} };
var obj2 = {};
obj2.subObj = obj.subObj;
var s = obj.subObj;

You now have three references, obj.subObj, obj2.subObj, and s, to the same object. None of them is special.