Home » JavaScript Examples

How to access an object having spaces in the object's key using JavaScript?

Here, we are going to learn how to access an object having spaces in the object's key using JavaScript?
Submitted by Siddhant Verma, on December 11, 2019

Sometimes your JavaScript object may contain a key having spaces between them. As a key can also be a string and a string may contain spaces, it is very much possible that you encounter this problem. Consider the following object,

const character= {
	name: 'Emily', 
	age: 30, 
	'Detective Rating': 422
}

console.log(character);

Output

{name: "Emily", age: 30, Detective Rating: 422}

Let's use the dot notation to access the properties of our object,

console.log(character.name);
console.log(character.Detective Rating);
console.log(character.'Detective Rating');

Output

Emily
Uncaught SyntaxError: missing ) after argument list
Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected string

Accessing an object having spaces in the object's key using JavaScript

For regular properties we can easily use the dot notation however for a string property having spaces in between the dot notation doesn't work. Then how do we directly access such properties?

Remember, there is another way of accessing the object's properties, ie, using the square bracket notation.

console.log(character["name"]);
console.log(character["Detective Rating"]);

Output

Emily
422

The square bracket notation works for keys having spaces between them since it takes in a string as a parameter. Let's try some more examples,

const instructor={
	ID: 'EC-203',
	subject: 'Electronics',
	'Project advisor': 'Digital signal processing documentation',
}
	
console.log(instructor["Project advisor"]);

Output

Digital signal processing documentation

Here our instructor object has a key Project advisor with space in between and we access this property using the square bracket notation.

const monsters={
	'Monster names': ['Sesham','Goku','Samu']
}

console.log(monsters["Monster names"]);

Output

(3) ["Sesham", "Goku", "Samu"]

Our monsters have a property Monster names with space in between. This is an array and we have accessed this using the square bracket notation.

JavaScript Examples »

---