Check if a value is an object in JavaScript

Question

How do you check if a value is an object in JavaScript?

Answer 1

Let's define "object" in Javascript. According to the MDN docs, every value is either an object or a primitive:

primitive, primitive value

A data that is not an object and does not have any methods. JavaScript has 5 primitive datatypes: string, number, boolean, null, undefined.

What's a primitive?

• 3
• 'abc'
• true
• null
• undefined

What's an object (i.e. not a primitive)?

• Object.prototype
• everything descended from Object.prototype
  • Function.prototype
    • Object
    • Function
    • function C(){} -- user-defined functions
  • C.prototype -- the prototype property of a user-defined function: this is not Cs prototype
    • new C() -- "new"-ing a user-defined function
  • Math
  • Array.prototype
    • arrays
  • {"a": 1, "b": 2} -- objects created using literal notation
  • new Number(3) -- wrappers around primitives
  • ... many other things ...
• Object.create(null)
• everything descended from an Object.create(null)

How to check whether a value is an object

instanceof by itself won't work, because it misses two cases:

// oops:  isObject(Object.prototype) -> false
// oops:  isObject(Object.create(null)) -> false
function isObject(val) {
    return val instanceof Object; 
}

typeof x === 'object' won't work, because of false positives (null) and false negatives (functions):

// oops: isObject(Object) -> false
function isObject(val) {
    return (typeof val === 'object');
}

Object.prototype.toString.call won't work, because of false positives for all of the primitives:

> Object.prototype.toString.call(3)
"[object Number]"

> Object.prototype.toString.call(new Number(3))
"[object Number]"

So I use:

function isObject(val) {
    if (val === null) { return false;}
    return ( (typeof val === 'function') || (typeof val === 'object') );
}

---

@Daan's answer also seems to work:

function isObject(obj) {
  return obj === Object(obj);
}

because, according to the MDN docs:

The Object constructor creates an object wrapper for the given value. If the value is null or undefined, it will create and return an empty object, otherwise, it will return an object of a type that corresponds to the given value. If the value is an object already, it will return the value.

---

A third way that seems to work (not sure if it's 100%) is to use Object.getPrototypeOf which throws an exception if its argument isn't an object:

// these 5 examples throw exceptions
Object.getPrototypeOf(null)
Object.getPrototypeOf(undefined)
Object.getPrototypeOf(3)
Object.getPrototypeOf('abc')
Object.getPrototypeOf(true)

// these 5 examples don't throw exceptions
Object.getPrototypeOf(Object)
Object.getPrototypeOf(Object.prototype)
Object.getPrototypeOf(Object.create(null))
Object.getPrototypeOf([])
Object.getPrototypeOf({})