Would this be a valid way of validating dot notation?

Question

I'm building out a component that accepts an input of dot notation. I want to validate the input and when I stopped to think about "what is valid dot notation" I figured this would be a simple way of doing it, but it almost seems too simple so now I'm wondering if I'm missing something:

function isValidDotNotation(content: string) {
  try {
    content.split(".")
    return true
  } catch (exception) {
    return false
  }
}

So:

• dot notation is a way of specifying a namespace within a json data structure then it seems like our main concern is validating keys
• JSON requires strings for keys
• the split static method hangs off of String so you'd only be able to fire it on a string
• Specifying an array index in dot notation just makes the square brackets part of a string (e.g. in example.widgets[0].name, widgets[0] is still a valid string when .split()
• A single level dot notation string can still be split into a single array value (e.g. "test".split(".") still works)

So when we fire split, as long as we don't throw an exception the the string given should be a valid dot notation. It may or may not lead you to anything within the json structure, but as far as a valid value it should be good, right?

Am I missing any nuance here? I've seen examples of people looping through the structure and stuff, but it seems like overkill to validate unless I'm missing something.

Answer 1

You're missing something. Your original code won't work with the input:

content1 = "example.widgets[.0].name"
content2 = "example.widgets[0].name."

Answer 2

string.split will never throw an exception when passed a string. Therefore, via these rules, any string is valid dot notation. In that case you only need to verify whether something is a string, which you can do like so:

typeof content === 'string'