removing-entries-from-an-object.org

WARNING: This is old and likely obsolete.

Removing entries from an object

• Time-stamp: <2020-03-23 05:06:10 tamara>
• date: 2018-05-15 00:38
• keywords: javascript, lodash, reduce, snippets

I was casting about for a simple way to remove specific keys from an object before returning it to a consumer function. In this particular case, I wanted to remove all the entries that began with an underscore ("_").

There’s nothing like Ruby’s Hash Enumerbles, but there is a library of such functions for JavaScript, lodash that fills in rather well.

For this exercise, I used the =reduce= function in the Collections set of functions.

reduce syntax

The syntax for lodash’s reduce is:

result = _.reduce(collection, filter, initialValue)

the filter

In the reduce function, you need to provide it with an iteratee – something that acts on the current thing in the collection and returns the updated accumulator.

The function signature for the filter (iteratee) is:

function filter(accumulator, value, key, collection)

If the collection is an Object, the key is the current key. If the collection is an Array, it’s the current index.

In my case, I want to dump all keys that start with underscore, so the filter function is:

function no_(acc, value, key) {
  if (!key.startsWith("_")) {
    acc[key] = value
  }
  return acc
}

putting it all together

In a simple example, I have obj1 that has a bad key: _bad that I want removed:

let obj1 = {
  _bad: 1,
  good: 2
}

function no_(accumulator, value, key) {
  if (!key.startsWith("_")) {
    accumulator[key] = value
  }
  return accumulator
}

let obj2 = _.reduce(obj1, no_, {})

The end result in obj2 is:

{ good: 2 }

which is just what I wanted.

There’s a jsfiddle at https://jsfiddle.net/tamouse/5f3L5dbz/