Profile Lookup (hasOwnProperty) Clarification

Tell us what’s happening:

I am confused as to why my original code does not work for this challenge. I used:

              if (contacts[i][prop] === prop) {

The code is only accepted if the following is used:

              if (contacts[i].hasOwnProperty(prop) {

Can someone clarify why I cannot check for the existence of the prop argument using the first method?

Thanks



Your code so far

//Setup
var contacts = [
    {
        "firstName": "Akira",
        "lastName": "Laine",
        "number": "0543236543",
        "likes": ["Pizza", "Coding", "Brownie Points"]
    },
    {
        "firstName": "Harry",
        "lastName": "Potter",
        "number": "0994372684",
        "likes": ["Hogwarts", "Magic", "Hagrid"]
    },
    {
        "firstName": "Sherlock",
        "lastName": "Holmes",
        "number": "0487345643",
        "likes": ["Intriguing Cases", "Violin"]
    },
    {
        "firstName": "Kristian",
        "lastName": "Vos",
        "number": "unknown",
        "likes": ["Javascript", "Gaming", "Foxes"]
    }
];


function lookUpProfile(firstName, prop){
// Only change code below this line
  for (var i = 0; i < contacts.length; i++) {
    if (contacts[i].firstName === firstName) {
      **if (contacts[i][prop] === prop) {**
        return contacts[i][prop];
      } else {
        return "No such property";
      }
    }
  }
  
  return "No such contact";
// Only change code above this line
}


// Change these values to test your function
lookUpProfile("Akira", "firstName");

Your browser information:

Your Browser User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.90 Safari/537.36.

Link to the challenge:

Ahh, that makes sense. Thanks for the breakdown!