The other answers to this question are outdated, never matched implementation reality, and have officially become incorrect now that the ES6 / ES2015 spec has been published.
See the section on property iteration order in Exploring ES6 by Axel Rauschmayer:
All methods that iterate over property keys do so in the same order:
- First all Array indices, sorted numerically.
- Then all string keys (that are not indices), in the order in which they were created.
- Then all symbols, in the order in which they were created.
So yes, JavaScript objects are in fact ordered, and the order of their keys/properties can be changed.
Here’s how you can sort an object by its keys/properties, alphabetically:
const unordered = {
'b': 'foo',
'c': 'bar',
'a': 'baz'
};
console.log(JSON.stringify(unordered));
// → '{"b":"foo","c":"bar","a":"baz"}'
const ordered = Object.keys(unordered).sort().reduce(
(obj, key) => {
obj[key] = unordered[key];
return obj;
},
{}
);
console.log(JSON.stringify(ordered));
// → '{"a":"baz","b":"foo","c":"bar"}'
Use var instead of const for compatibility with ES5 engines.