Question

I wonder if it would be possible for me to employ a recursive function to read all the attributes and properties of an object including the nested properties and such. for example,
if I have an object:

  var mObj = {};
  mObj.countries = [];
  mObj.country = {};
  mObj.country.states = [];
  mObj.country.state = {};
  mObj.country.state = {};

I am sure you get the picture. If it was just a simple object then I can employ “for in” loop, and perhaps nested “for in” loop, an object has numerous nested levels then using nested “for in” loops becomes somewhat chaos. I thought it would wonderful to employ recursion. Any help insight to this would highly appreciated.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Here’s a quick example that does this in case you end up running into any problems.

var level = '';
var readProperties = function(val) {
    if (Object.prototype.toString.call(val) === '[object Object]') {
        for (var propertyName in val) {
            if (val.hasOwnProperty(propertyName)) {
                console.log(level + propertyName + ':');
                level += '  ';
                readProperties(val[propertyName]);
            }
        }
    }
    else {
        console.log(level + val);
        level = level.substring(0, level.length - 2);
    }
}