Access the outer scope's variables via bracket notation

Question

Obviously an inner function can access the outer scope's variables, eg

function example() {
    console.log('My name is ' + name);
}

var name = 'Dave';
example();

Is it possible to access that variable with bracket notation? eg

function example() {
    console.log('My name is ' + outerScope['name']);
}

(For those of you wondering why I want to do this, it's for a potential debugging technique, not actual production code).

Answer 1

No, that's impossible. Scopes are no objects accessible from JS code, and don't have properties.

You can use eval though if you want to access variables by their name with a string. Alternatively, you should check whether your runtime has a debugging API that you could use, it will typically expose such information.