I added +/- 10-15% efficiency to the selected answer by minor code refactoring and moving the recursive function outside of the function namespace.
See my question: Are namespaced functions reevaluated on every call? for why this slows nested functions down.
function _flatten (target, obj, path) {
var i, empty;
if (obj.constructor === Object) {
empty = true;
for (i in obj) {
empty = false;
_flatten(target, obj[i], path ? path + '.' + i : i);
}
if (empty && path) {
target[path] = {};
}
}
else if (obj.constructor === Array) {
i = obj.length;
if (i > 0) {
while (i--) {
_flatten(target, obj[i], path + '[' + i + ']');
}
} else {
target[path] = [];
}
}
else {
target[path] = obj;
}
}
function flatten (data) {
var result = {};
_flatten(result, data, null);
return result;
}
See benchmark.