Variable variables in JavaScript?

Question

In PHP I can mess around with variable variables and I'm wondering if I can do the same in JavaScript.

I want to create a new object with a property which's name is based on the value of a variable.

if ( obj.name === 'foo' ) {
    var data = { foo: value };
}
if ( obj.name === 'bar' ) {
    var data = { bar: value };
}

Is there a shorter way of doing this without using eval()? Something like:

var data = { obj.name: value };

Answer 1

Try this:

var data = {};
data[obj.name] = value;

You can read some more about js objects Here.

Answer 2

Objects in JavaScript are simply hash maps. You can access members by indexing with their names. For your problem you can use

var data = {};
data[obj.name] = value;

I've used this to implement a dynamic dispatch mechanism for arithmetic operations on different numerical types as described here.