Javascript's equivalent to PHP's $$varName

Question

Possible Duplicate:
How to access javascript variable value by creating another variable via concatenation?

In PHP I can have:

$theVariable = "bigToe";
$bigToe = "is broken";

such that:

echo "my ".$theVariable." ".$$theVariable;

would display

my bigToe is broken

How would I go about doing something similar to that in JavaScript?

Answer 1

Simply

eval("variableName")

Although you have to be sure you know the exact value your evaling as it can be used for script injection if you're passing it untrusted content

Answer 2

There is a pretty good write-up on Dynamic Variables in JavaScript here:

http://www.hiteshagrawal.com/javascript/dynamic-variables-in-javascript

Answer 3

One way is to use the eval function

var theVariable = "bigToe";
var bigToe = "is broken";
console.log('my '+theVariable+' '+eval(theVariable));

Another way is to use the window object, which holds the key-value pair for each global variable. It can accessed as an array:

var theVariable = "bigToe";
var bigToe = "is broken";
console.log('my '+theVariable+' '+window[theVariable]);

Both methods print the answer to the Firebug console.

Answer 4

I would use the window array instead of eval:

var bigToe = "big toe";
window[bigToe] = ' is broken';
alert("my " + bigToe + window[bigToe]);