3.6 Objects

An object is a collection of named pieces of data. These named pieces of data are usually referred to as properties of the object. (Sometimes they are called "fields" of the object, but this usage can be confusing.) To refer to a property of an object, we refer to the object, and follow this reference with a period, and follow the period with the name of the property. For example, if an object named image has properties named width and height, we can refer to those properties like this:

image.width
image.height

document.myform.button

As mentioned above, when a function value is stored in a property of an object, that function is often called a method, and the property name becomes the method name. To invoke a method of an object, use the . syntax to extract the function value from the object, and then use the () syntax to invoke that function. To invoke the write() method of the document object, we use code like this:

document.write("this is a test");

Objects in JavaScript have the ability to serve as associative arrays--that is, they can associate arbitrary data values with arbitrary strings. When objects are used in this way, a different syntax is generally required to access the object's properties: a string containing the name of the desired property is enclosed within square brackets. Using this syntax we could access the properties of the image object mentioned above with code like this:

image["width"]
image["height"]