The most accurate way to check JS object's type?

Question

The typeof operator doesn\'t really help us to find the real type of an object.

I\'ve already seen the following code :

Object.prototyp         


        

Answer 1

I'd argue that most of the solutions shown here suffer from being over-engineerd. Probably the most simple way to check if a value is of type [object Object] is to check against the .constructor property of it:

function isObject (a) { return a != null && a.constructor === Object; }

or even shorter with arrow-functions:

const isObject = a => a != null && a.constructor === Object;

The a != null part is necessary because one might pass in null or undefined and you cannot extract a constructor property from either of these.

It works with any object created via:

• the Object constructor
• literals {}

Another neat feature of it, is it's ability to give correct reports for custom classes which make use of Symbol.toStringTag. For example:

class MimicObject {
  get [Symbol.toStringTag]() {
    return 'Object';
  }
}

The problem here is that when calling Object.prototype.toString on an instance of it, the false report [object Object] will be returned:

let fakeObj = new MimicObject();
Object.prototype.toString.call(fakeObj); // -> [object Object]

But checking against the constructor gives a correct result:

let fakeObj = new MimicObject();
fakeObj.constructor === Object; // -> false