searching for characters within a JavaScript property name

Question

I'm relatively new to JavaScript so please forgive me if this is silly/impossible, but I'm trying to standardize names of properties within a JavaScript object. For example, I have code such as

var object = {
    "firstName": "Joe",
    "MiddleName": "Roy",
    "last_name": "Fool"
}

I want to make a new object that has property names firstName, middleName, and lastName. Is there any way to search through these properties and see which ones are in violation? Otherwise, I could always just make a total copy but that would be quite inefficient. Thanks

Answer 1

This might be going beyond what you're looking for, but it's pretty easy to convert your underscore-separated naming to camelcase; you can iterate over your object and produce a new object with the correct names:

var converter = /_(\w)/g, lowerFirst = /^(\w)/;
function convertName(name) {
  if (converter.test(name)) {
    name = name.toLowerCase().replace(converter, function ($0, $1) {
             return $1.toUpperCase();
           });
  } else {
    // correct a first letter being uppercase
    name = name.replace(lowerFirst, function ($0, $1){ return $1.toLowerCase(); });
  }

  return name;
}

var hasOwnProperty = Object.prototype.hasOwnProperty,
    toString = Object.prototype.toString;

function isPlainObject(obj) {
  return toString.call(obj) === '[object Object]';
}


function convertObject(obj) {
  var k, output = {};
  for(k in obj) {
    if (hasOwnProperty.call(obj, k)) {
      output[convertName(k)] = isPlainObject(obj[k]) ? convertObject(obj[k]) : obj[k];
    }
  }

  return output;
}

If the property names are already in camelcase, they won't be changed by the regexp.