BFE.dev solution for JavaScript Coding Question
176. undefined to null

This awesome solution is created by @yanina-nas !

Goal

Our goal is to implement a function that:

  • takes one parameter of type any
  • returns a copy of it where all undefined values are replaced by null

Observations

We can make several observations here:

  • We don't know from the prompt how deeply nested our undefined can be, so our function must be recursive (although this might be not memory safe at all if there are thousands of levels of nesting).
  • We need to return a copy with all undefined replaced with null, so we cannot mutate our original input.

Implementation

First, we need to understand what can be passed to our function. There are three cases we care about, our input is:

  • undefined
  • an array or an object (that can potentially have undefined inside)
  • anything else (that doesn't fall into one of the cases above)

Case 1. undefined

We handle undefined case by returning null instead.

function undefinedToNull(arg) {
  if (arg === undefined) {
    return null;
  }
}

Case 2A. An array

We use the Array.prototype.map() method to create a new array populated with the results of calling our undefinedToNull function on every element in our original array.

function undefinedToNull(arg) {
  if (arg === undefined) {
    return null;
  }
  else if (Array.isArray(arg)) {
    return arg.map(undefinedToNull)
  }
}

Case 2A. An object

To create a new object, we can use Array.prototype.reduce() method on an array of keys of our object, while passing an empty object as an accumulator to reduce, and using the spread operator ... to populate our new object with original keys and values returned by our undefinedToNull function.

function undefinedToNull(arg) {
  if (arg === undefined) {
    return null;
  }
  else if (Array.isArray(arg)) {
    return arg.map(undefinedToNull)
  }
  else if (Object.prototype.toString.call(arg) === '[object Object]') {
    return Object.keys(arg).reduce((acc, currentKey) => ({
      ...acc,
      [currentKey]: undefinedToNull(arg[currentKey]),
    }), {});
  }
}

Case 3. Anything else

Given anything else, just return it. And we get our solution.

Complete solution code

function undefinedToNull(arg) {
  if (arg === undefined) {
    return null;
  }
  else if (Array.isArray(arg)) {
    return arg.map(undefinedToNull)
  }
  else if (Object.prototype.toString.call(arg) === '[object Object]') {
    return Object.keys(arg).reduce((acc, currentKey) => ({
      ...acc,
      [currentKey]: undefinedToNull(arg[currentKey]),
    }), {});
  }
  return arg;
}
You might also be able to find a solution fromcommunity posts or fromAI solution.