Question

Is there a way to get (from somewhere) the number of elements in a Javascript object?? (i.e. constant-time complexity).

I can’t find a property or method that retrieves that information. So far I can only think of doing an iteration through the whole collection, but that’s linear time.
It’s strange there is no direct access to the size of the object, don’t you think.

EDIT:
I’m talking about the Object object (not objects in general):

var obj = new Object ;

Answer 1

Although JS implementations might keep track of such a value internally, there’s no standard way to get it.

In the past, Mozilla’s Javascript variant exposed the non-standard __count__, but it has been removed with version 1.8.5.

For cross-browser scripting you’re stuck with explicitly iterating over the properties and checking hasOwnProperty():

function countProperties(obj) {
    var count = 0;

    for(var prop in obj) {
        if(obj.hasOwnProperty(prop))
            ++count;
    }

    return count;
}

In case of ECMAScript 5 capable implementations, this can also be written as (Kudos to Avi Flax)

function countProperties(obj) {
    return Object.keys(obj).length;
}

Keep in mind that you’ll also miss properties which aren’t enumerable (eg an array’s length).

If you’re using a framework like jQuery, Prototype, Mootools, $whatever-the-newest-hype, check if they come with their own collections API, which might be a better solution to your problem than using native JS objects.