How do I enumerate the properties of a JavaScript object? [duplicate]

Answer 1

The standard way, which has already been proposed several times is:

for (var name in myObject) {
  alert(name);
}

However Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 have a bug in the JavaScript interpreter, which has the effect that some keys are not enumerated. If you run this code:

var obj = { toString: 12};
for (var name in obj) {
  alert(name);
}

If will alert "12" in all browsers except IE. IE will simply ignore this key. The affected key values are:

• isPrototypeOf
• hasOwnProperty
• toLocaleString
• toString
• valueOf

To be really safe in IE you have to use something like:

for (var key in myObject) {
  alert(key);
}

var shadowedKeys = [
  "isPrototypeOf",
  "hasOwnProperty",
  "toLocaleString",
  "toString",
  "valueOf"
];
for (var i=0, a=shadowedKeys, l=a.length; i

The good news is that EcmaScript 5 defines the Object.keys(myObject) function, which returns the keys of an object as array and some browsers (e.g. Safari 4) already implement it.