JavaScript: The Good Parts

Object

JavaScript's objects are never truly empty because they can pick up members from the prototype chain. Sometimes that matters. For example, suppose you are writing a program that counts the number of occurrences of each word in a text. We can use the toLowerCase method to normalize the text to lowercase, and then use the split method with a regular expression to produce an array of words. We can then loop through the words and count the number of times we see each one:

var i;
var word;
var text =
        "This oracle of comfort has so pleased me, " +
        "That when I am in heaven I shall desire " +
        "To see what this child does, " +
        "and praise my Constructor.";

var words = text.toLowerCase(  ).split(/[\s,.]+/);
var count = {};
for (i = 0; i < words.length; i += 1) {
    word = words[i];
    if (count[word]) {
        count[word] += 1;
    } else {
        count[word] = 1;
    }
}

If we look at the results, count['this'] is 2 and count.heaven is 1, but count.constructor contains a crazy looking string. The reason is that the count object inherits from Object.prototype, and Object.prototype contains a member named constructor whose value is Object. The += operator, like the + operator, does concatenation rather than addition when its operands are not numbers. Object is a function, so += converts it to a string somehow and concatenates a 1 to its butt.

We can avoid problems like this the same way we avoid problems with for in: by testing for membership with the hasOwnProperty method or by looking for specific types. In this ...