Tell us what’s happening:
I went to Claude to ask what the problem is with this code. and I got back this message. can someone elaborate what the clone and assign messages are meant to say
Let me try explaining this in a different way:
The core issue is that myStorage.car.inside["glove box"] returns a read-only reference to the value “maps”.
When we do:
const gloveBoxContents = "";
gloveBoxContents = myStorage.car.inside["glove box"];
This doesn’t make a copy of “maps” - it just assigns the same read-only reference to the gloveBoxContents variable.
So now gloveBoxContents and myStorage.car.inside["glove box"] point to the same immutable “maps” string.
Later if we tried to do:
gloveBoxContents = "new item";
It will throw an error, because we can’t modify that read-only “maps” value.
To fix it, we need to explicitly make a copy of the “maps” string, like:
const gloveBoxContents = JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(myStorage.car.inside["glove box"]));
Now gloveBoxContents points to a new copy of “maps”, not the read-only reference. So we can modify it freely without affecting the original.
The key takeaway is that assigning an object property to a variable doesn’t automatically make a copy - it just creates another reference to the same value. We need to manually copy it to make it writable.
Your code so far
const myStorage = {
"car": {
"inside": {
"glove box": "maps",
"passenger seat": "crumbs"
},
"outside": {
"trunk": "jack"
}
}
};
const gloveBoxContents = " ";
gloveBoxContents = myStorage.car.inside["glove box"];
Your browser information:
User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/16.5 Safari/605.1.15
Challenge: Basic JavaScript - Accessing Nested Objects
Link to the challenge: