How to check if object within object exists

Question

It seems that the following technique for checking the existence of an object member produces an error because the \'bar\' parent object hasn\'t been declared before the che

Answer 1

var newVal = ('foo' in window && // could be typeof foo !== 'undefined' if you want all scopes
             'bar' in foo &&
             'myVal' in foo.bar) ? foo.bar.myVal : null;

To be fair to javascript, that reads almost like natural language.