Angular/JS/Typescript- Recursively access properties in an object

Issue

Suppose I got an object defined as such:

const me = {
    id: 1,
    name: 'James',
    age: 40,
    family: {
        mother: {
            id: 101,
            name: 'Bea',
            age: 66
        },
        father: {
            id: 102,
            name: 'Martin',
            age: 69
        },
        children: [
            {
                id: 11,
                name: 'Tom',
                age: 18,
            },
            {
                id: 12,
                name: 'Nancy',
                age: 13,
            },
        ],
    },
}

How does one easily access a value by just giving an array of strings of the chained properties' names? For example, calling:

search(me, ['family', 'father', 'age'])

which would be the same as:

me['family']['father']['age']

would return 69.

PS: What about having search(me, ['family', 'children', 'name']) return ['Tom', 'Nancy']?

PSS: Or even search(me, ['family', 'children', ['name', 'age']]) returning

[
    {
        name: 'Tom',
        age: 18
    },
    {
        name: 'Nancy',
        age: 13
    }
]

EDIT: I went checking out lodash/deepdash libraries, but couldn't really figure it out by myself.

Solution

You can do that with this simple recursive function which takes an array as the query:

const me = {
    id: 1,
    name: 'James',
    age: 40,
    family: {
        mother: {
            id: 101,
            name: 'Bea',
            age: 66
        },
        father: {
            id: 102,
            name: 'Martin',
            age: 69
        },
        children: [
            {
                id: 11,
                name: 'Tom',
                age: 18,
            },
            {
                id: 12,
                name: 'Nancy',
                age: 13,
            },
        ],
    },
}


function search(obj, [first, ...rest]) {
  return rest.length ? search(obj[first], rest) : obj[first];
}

const result = search(me, ['family', 'father', 'age']);

console.log(result);

Answered By - Guerric P