JavaScript — Make Your Code Cleaner With Lodash

I want to share with you a tip for cleaner code when you need to validate your code with a bunch of if statements.

How many times you wrote something like this:

let person = {};
let street = “Default message when street is undefined”;
if( person && person.address && person.address.street ) {
 street = person.address.street;
}

How many times did you get an annoying exception because you forgot to check one step in your validation process?

And this is only a simple object I’m sure you wrote a lot more than that.

Lodash has a util function that helps with this chaos.

get( object, path, [defaultValue] )

Gets the value at path of object. If the resolved value is undefined, the defaultValue is returned in its place

So now we can change our code to this:

import get from ‘lodash/get’;
let street = get(person, “address.street”, “Default message when street is undefined”);

We cleaner!

This is also works with arrays, for example:

let street = get(person, “addresses[0].street”, “Default message when street is undefined”);

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