Getting the first index of an object

user_112377 0
Viewed 395841

Consider:

var object = {
  foo: {},
  bar: {},
  baz: {}
}

How would I do this:

var first = object[0];
console.log(first);

Obviously, that doesn’t work because the first index is named foo, not 0.

console.log(object['foo']);

works, but I don’t know it’s named foo. It could be named anything. I just want the first.

javascript-objects javascript
14 Answers

they're not really ordered, but you can do:

var first;
for (var i in obj) {
    if (obj.hasOwnProperty(i) && typeof(i) !== 'function') {
        first = obj[i];
        break;
    }
}

the .hasOwnProperty() is important to ignore prototyped objects.

user_1085780

This will not give you the first one as javascript objects are unordered, however this is fine in some cases.

myObject[Object.keys(myObject)[0]]
user_5624650

If the order of the objects is significant, you should revise your JSON schema to store the objects in an array:

[
    {"name":"foo", ...},
    {"name":"bar", ...},
    {"name":"baz", ...}
]

or maybe:

[
    ["foo", {}],
    ["bar", {}],
    ["baz", {}]
]

As Ben Alpert points out, properties of Javascript objects are unordered, and your code is broken if you expect them to enumerate in the same order that they are specified in the object literal—there is no "first" property.

user_644740

There is no way to get the first element, seeing as "hashes" (objects) in JavaScript have unordered properties. Your best bet is to store the keys in an array:

var keys = ["foo", "bar", "baz"];

Then use that to get the proper value:

object[keys[0]]
user_494850

I had the same problem yesterday. I solved it like this:

var obj = {
        foo:{},
        bar:{},
        baz:{}
    },
   first = null,
   key = null;
for (var key in obj) {
    first = obj[key];
    if(typeof(first) !== 'function') {
        break;
    }
}
// first is the first enumerated property, and key it's corresponding key.

Not the most elegant solution, and I am pretty sure that it may yield different results in different browsers (i.e. the specs says that enumeration is not required to enumerate the properties in the same order as they were defined). However, I only had a single property in my object so that was a non-issue. I just needed the first key.

user_1018110

You could do something like this:

var object = {
    foo:{a:'first'},
    bar:{},
    baz:{}
}


function getAttributeByIndex(obj, index){
  var i = 0;
  for (var attr in obj){
    if (index === i){
      return obj[attr];
    }
    i++;
  }
  return null;
}


var first = getAttributeByIndex(object, 0); // returns the value of the
                                            // first (0 index) attribute
                                            // of the object ( {a:'first'} )
CMS_54450
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