It seems that the following technique for checking the existence of an object member produces an error because the 'bar' parent object hasn't been declared before the check, which means I either have to declare it before the check or use two 'typeof' expressions, either of which would be excess code:

var foo = {},

    newVal = (typeof foo.bar.myVal !== 'undefined' ? foo.bar.myVal : null );



Error: foo.bar is undefined

So, how do you check if a member within an undeclared object exists without producing an error?

I love javascript, but sometimes...