Fastest way to flatten / un-flatten nested JSON objects

Question

I threw some code together to flatten and un-flatten complex/nested JSON objects. It works, but it\'s a bit slow (triggers the \'long script\' warning).

For the flat

Answer 1

Here's another approach that runs slower (about 1000ms) than the above answer, but has an interesting idea :-)

Instead of iterating through each property chain, it just picks the last property and uses a look-up-table for the rest to store the intermediate results. This look-up-table will be iterated until there are no property chains left and all values reside on uncocatenated properties.

JSON.unflatten = function(data) {
    "use strict";
    if (Object(data) !== data || Array.isArray(data))
        return data;
    var regex = /\.?([^.\[\]]+)$|\[(\d+)\]$/,
        props = Object.keys(data),
        result, p;
    while(p = props.shift()) {
        var m = regex.exec(p),
            target;
        if (m.index) {
            var rest = p.slice(0, m.index);
            if (!(rest in data)) {
                data[rest] = m[2] ? [] : {};
                props.push(rest);
            }
            target = data[rest];
        } else {
            target = result || (result = (m[2] ? [] : {}));
        }
        target[m[2] || m[1]] = data[p];
    }
    return result;
};

It currently uses the data input parameter for the table, and puts lots of properties on it - a non-destructive version should be possible as well. Maybe a clever lastIndexOf usage performs better than the regex (depends on the regex engine).

See it in action here.