Question

I want to do something along these lines:

var firstName = "alan";
var secondName = "antonella";
var statusOfPeople = {
    firstName: "excellent",
    secondName: "superb"
};
console.log(JSON.stringify(statusOfPeople));

And get this output:

{ "alan": "excellent", "antonella": "superb" }

Is this possible? Without doing this?

var statusOfPeople = {};
statusOfPeople[firstName] = "excellent";
statusOfPeople[secondName] = "superb";

Answer 1

No, not directly in the object literal declaration.

It would be impossible to tell if you intended the variable value, or the identifier itself as the property name.

---

You could create a helper function that takes arrays of key/value pairs if you wanted:

function makeObject() {
    var obj = {};
    for( var i = 0; i < arguments.length; ++i ) {
        obj[ arguments[i][0] ] = arguments[i][1];
    }
    return obj;
}

And use it like:

var firstName = "alan";
var secondName = "antonella"; 

var statusOfPeople = makeObject(
    [firstName, "excellent"],
    [secondName, "superb"]
);

console.log(JSON.stringify(statusOfPeople)); 

// {"alan":"excellent","antonella":"superb"}

---

You could even reduce the syntax a bit if you did it like this:

function makeObject() {
    var obj = {};
    for( var i = 0; i < arguments.length; i+=2 ) {
        obj[ arguments[i] ] = arguments[i+1];
    }
    return obj;
}

And used it like this:

var firstName = "alan";
var secondName = "antonella"; 

var statusOfPeople = makeObject(
    firstName, "excellent",
    secondName, "superb"
);

console.log(JSON.stringify(statusOfPeople)); 

// {"alan":"excellent","antonella":"superb"}