Is there an easy way to parse an object literal as a string into a new object?
I'm looking to turn a string like the following:
'{ name: "A", list: [] }'
Into an object like:
{ name: 'A', list: [] }
Note:
I'm not looking for JSON.parse() as it accepts json strings and not object literal strings. I was hoping that eval would work but unfortunately it does not.
eval does indeed work, with one tweak: the problem is that the standalone line
{ name: 'A', list: [] }
gets parsed as the interpreter as the beginning of a block, rather than as the start of an object literal. So, just like arrow functions which implicitly return objects need to have parentheses surrounding the objects:
arr.map(item => ({ item }))
you need to put parentheses around the input string, so that the content inside (that is, the object, which starts with {) is parsed properly as an expression:
const input = '{ name: "A", list: [] }';
const obj = eval('(' + input + ')');
console.log(obj);Of course, as with all cases when eval is involved, you should be very sure that the input is trustworthy first.
While I would never do this IRL, you could perhaps try this:
var myObjLiteralString = '{ name: "A", list: [] }';
var myObj;
eval('myObj = ' + myObjLiteralString);
console.log(myObj);
