I'd like to suggest an amendment to Zach/RegularMike's answer (but don't have the "reputation" to be able to comment!). I found there solution a very useful basis, but suffered in my application because if there are strings within arrays it would recursively call the function for every character in the string (which caused IE11 & Edge browsers to fail with "out of stack space" errors). My simple optimization was to add the same test used in the "object" clause recursive call to the one in the "array" clause:
if (arrayElem instanceof Object || arrayElem instanceof Array) {
Thus my full code (which is now looking for all instances of a particular key, so slightly different to the original requirement) is:
// Get all instances of specified property deep within supplied object
function getPropsInObject(theObject, targetProp) {
var result = [];
if (theObject instanceof Array) {
for (var i = 0; i < theObject.length; i++) {
var arrayElem = theObject[i];
if (arrayElem instanceof Object || arrayElem instanceof Array) {
result = result.concat(getPropsInObject(arrayElem, targetProp));
}
}
} else {
for (var prop in theObject) {
var objProp = theObject[prop];
if (prop == targetProp) {
return theObject[prop];
}
if (objProp instanceof Object || objProp instanceof Array) {
result = result.concat(getPropsInObject(objProp, targetProp));
}
}
}
return result;
}