How to call object and its method with a variable

Question

I have a bunch of jQuery objects with a init method, so right now I have something like this

$.myobject1.init(somevar);
$.myobject2.init(somevar); 
$.myobject3.init(somevar);
$.myobject4.init(somevar);
$.myobject5.init(somevar); // somevar is the same var in all the calls

but I'm looking for a way to simply this code, something like this

var objectName = "myobject1"; // or any other object name
$. objectName .init(somevar);

thanks for the help! :-)

possible duplicate of [How do I reference a javascript object property with a hyphen in it?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7122609/how-do-i-reference-a-javascript-object-property-with-a-hyphen-in-it) — Quentin, Oct 08 '13 at 14:31
the answers look good, but if you do want to do it with strings, remember in javascript foo.bar == foo["bar"]. so $["myobject1"].init(somevar) should do what you want for the second code piece. — Adam D. Ruppe, Oct 08 '13 at 14:31

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 08 '13 at 14:30

1

Since they are already jQuery objects you don't need $. and you can use .add() like this :

var object = myobject1.add(myobject2).add(myobject3).add(myobject4).add(myobject5);
object.init(somvar)

answered Oct 08 '13 at 14:30

Anton

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 08 '13 at 14:32

1

Just use

$[objectName].init(somevar);

answered Oct 08 '13 at 14:32

Piotr

671
6
17

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 08 '13 at 14:32

0

in javascript, all objects are maps. it's really weird, but it means you can do this trick:

var p = "mypropertyname";
var obj = {};
obj[p] = somevalue;

then, if you do:

console.log(obj.mypropertyname)

you'll get:

> somevalue

answered Oct 08 '13 at 14:32

Hassan Hayat

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8
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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 08 '13 at 14:37

If you mean you want to loop through the names of your objects, then you should know that you can't combine strings with dot notation:

var someObj = {
    subObj: {
        a: 5
    }
};

someObj.subObj.a === 5;       // true
someObj."subObj".a === 5;     // throws error

But you can use strings with square bracket notation:

someObj["subObj"].a === 5;       // true

var propName = "subObj";

someObj[propName].a === 5;       // true

So you can use that to loop through your object names with a for loop, or you can use a jQuery method as suggested in other answers.

How to call object and its method with a variable

4 Answers4