JSON find in JavaScript

(You’re not searching through “JSON”, you’re searching through an array — the JSON string has already been deserialized into an object graph, in this case an array.)

Some options:

Use an Object Instead of an Array

If you’re in control of the generation of this thing, does it have to be an array? Because if not, there’s a much simpler way.

Say this is your original data:

[
    {"id": "one",   "pId": "foo1", "cId": "bar1"},
    {"id": "two",   "pId": "foo2", "cId": "bar2"},
    {"id": "three", "pId": "foo3", "cId": "bar3"}
]

Could you do the following instead?

{
    "one":   {"pId": "foo1", "cId": "bar1"},
    "two":   {"pId": "foo2", "cId": "bar2"},
    "three": {"pId": "foo3", "cId": "bar3"}
}

Then finding the relevant entry by ID is trivial:

id = "one"; // Or whatever
var entry = objJsonResp[id];

…as is updating it:

objJsonResp[id] = /* New value */;

…and removing it:

delete objJsonResp[id];

This takes advantage of the fact that in JavaScript, you can index into an object using a property name as a string — and that string can be a literal, or it can come from a variable as with id above.

Putting in an ID-to-Index Map

(Dumb idea, predates the above. Kept for historical reasons.)

It looks like you need this to be an array, in which case there isn’t really a better way than searching through the array unless you want to put a map on it, which you could do if you have control of the generation of the object. E.g., say you have this originally:

[
    {"id": "one",   "pId": "foo1", "cId": "bar1"},
    {"id": "two",   "pId": "foo2", "cId": "bar2"},
    {"id": "three", "pId": "foo3", "cId": "bar3"}
]

The generating code could provide an id-to-index map:

{
    "index": {
        "one": 0, "two": 1, "three": 2
    },
    "data": [
        {"id": "one",   "pId": "foo1", "cId": "bar1"},
        {"id": "two",   "pId": "foo2", "cId": "bar2"},
        {"id": "three", "pId": "foo3", "cId": "bar3"}
    ]
}

Then getting an entry for the id in the variable id is trivial:

var index = objJsonResp.index[id];
var obj = objJsonResp.data[index];

This takes advantage of the fact you can index into objects using property names.

Of course, if you do that, you have to update the map when you modify the array, which could become a maintenance problem.

But if you’re not in control of the generation of the object, or updating the map of ids-to-indexes is too much code and/ora maintenance issue, then you’ll have to do a brute force search.

Brute Force Search (corrected)

Somewhat OT (although you did ask if there was a better way 🙂 ), but your code for looping through an array is incorrect. Details here, but you can’t use for..in to loop through array indexes (or rather, if you do, you have to take special pains to do so); for..in loops through the properties of an object, not the indexes of an array. Your best bet with a non-sparse array (and yours is non-sparse) is a standard old-fashioned loop:

var k;
for (k = 0; k < someArray.length; ++k) { /* ... */ }

or

var k;
for (k = someArray.length - 1; k >= 0; --k) { /* ... */ }

Whichever you prefer (the latter is not always faster in all implementations, which is counter-intuitive to me, but there we are). (With a sparse array, you might use for..in but again taking special pains to avoid pitfalls; more in the article linked above.)

Using for..in on an array seems to work in simple cases because arrays have properties for each of their indexes, and their only other default properties (length and their methods) are marked as non-enumerable. But it breaks as soon as you set (or a framework sets) any other properties on the array object (which is perfectly valid; arrays are just objects with a bit of special handling around the length property).