How to remove a property from nested javascript objects any level deep?

There is no straight forward way to achieve this, however you can use this below function to remove a key from JSON.

function filterObject(obj, key) {
    for (var i in obj) {
        if (!obj.hasOwnProperty(i)) continue;
        if (typeof obj[i] == 'object') {
            filterObject(obj[i], key);
        } else if (i == key) {
            delete obj[key];
        }
    }
    return obj;
}

and use it like

var newObject = filterObject(old_json, "option");

A little modification of void's answer that allows for deletion of propertise which are also objects

function filterObject(obj, key) {
    for (var i in obj) {
        if (!obj.hasOwnProperty(i)) continue;
        if (i == key) {
            delete obj[key];
        } else if (typeof obj[i] == 'object') {
            filterObject(obj[i], key);
        }
    }
    return obj;
}

Modifying the above solution, To delete "dataID" which appears multiple times in my JSON . mentioned below code works fine.

var candidate = {
  "__dataID__": "Y2FuZGlkYXRlOjkuOTI3NDE5MDExMDU0Mjc2",
  "identity": {
    "__dataID__": "aWRlbnRpdHk6NjRmcDR2cnhneGE3NGNoZA==",
    "name": "Sumanth Suvarnas"
  },  
};

candidate = removeProp(candidate, "__dataID__")

console.log(JSON.stringify(candidate, undefined, 2));

function removeProp(obj, propToDelete) {
   for (var property in obj) {
      if (typeof obj[property] == "object") {
         delete obj.property
         let newJsonData= this.removeProp(obj[property], propToDelete);
         obj[property]= newJsonData
      } else {
          if (property === propToDelete) {
            delete obj[property];
          }
        }
    }
    return obj
}

We now use object-scan for data processing tasks like this. It's very powerful once you wrap your head around it. Here is how you'd answer your questions

// const objectScan = require('object-scan');

const prune = (input) => objectScan(['**.options'], {
  rtn: 'count',
  filterFn: ({ parent, property }) => {
    delete parent[property];
  }
})(input);

const obj = { items: [{ name: 'Item 1', value: '500', options: [{}, {}] }, { name: 'Item 2', value: '300', options: [{}, {}] }], name: 'Category', options: [{}, {}] };

console.log(prune(obj));
// => 3

console.log(obj);
// => { items: [ { name: 'Item 1', value: '500' }, { name: 'Item 2', value: '300' } ], name: 'Category' }

.as-console-wrapper {max-height: 100% !important; top: 0}

<script src="https://bundle.run/[email protected]"></script>

Disclaimer: I'm the author of object-scan

I had a similar issue and I got it resolved. I hope my solution might be helpful to someone.

I use Es6 ... spread operator to do a shallow copy of an object and made null to property I was not interested.

const newObject = {
   ...obj.items,
   ...obj.name,
   options: null // option property will be null.
}

function omit(source) {
  return isArray(source)
    ? source.map(omit)
    : isObject(source)
    ? (({ options, ...rst }) => mapValues(rst, omit))(source)
    : source;
}

as with lodash, that's an easy thing, also you can specify the key via an param like this

function omit(source, omitKey) {
  return isArray(source)
    ? source.map(partialRight(omit,omitKey)))
    : isObject(source)
    ? (({[omitKey]: _, ...rst }) => mapValues(rst, partialRight(omit,omitKey)))(source)
    : source;
}

You can remove properties given a condition using following function:

// Warning: this function mutates original object
const removeProperties = (obj, condition = (key, value) => false) => {
  for (var key in obj) {
    const value = obj[key]
    if (!obj.hasOwnProperty(key)) continue
    if (typeof obj[key] === "object") {
      removeProperties(obj[key], condition)
    } else if (condition(key, value)) {
      delete obj[key]
    }
  }
  return obj
}

Examples:

// Remove all properties where key is equal to 'options'
removeProperties(someObject, (key, value) => key === 'options'))


// Remove all properties where key starts with 'ignore_'
removeProperties(someObject, (key, value) => key.startsWith('ignore_'))


// Remove all properties where value is null
removeProperties(someObject, (key, value) => value === null))