How to avoid 'cannot read property of undefined' errors?

Question

In my code, I deal with an array that has some entries with many objects nested inside one another, where as some do not. It looks something like the following:

Answer 1

This is a common issue when working with deep or complex json object, so I try to avoid try/catch or embedding multiple checks which would make the code unreadable, I usually use this little piece of code in all my procect to do the job.

/* ex: getProperty(myObj,'aze.xyz',0) // return myObj.aze.xyz safely
 * accepts array for property names: 
 *     getProperty(myObj,['aze','xyz'],{value: null}) 
 */
function getProperty(obj, props, defaultValue) {
    var res, isvoid = function(x){return typeof x === "undefined" || x === null;}
    if(!isvoid(obj)){
        if(isvoid(props)) props = [];
        if(typeof props  === "string") props = props.trim().split(".");
        if(props.constructor === Array){
            res = props.length>1 ? getProperty(obj[props.shift()],props,defaultValue) : obj[props[0]];
        }
    }
    return typeof res === "undefined" ? defaultValue: res;
}