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This problem has eluded me for a while and I couldn't find an answer here on SO, so now that I solved it I thought I would put it here in case someone else has the same problem as me and can't find help.

I have a string I have gotten from a routeParam or a directive attribute or whatever, and I want to create a variable on the scope based on this. So: 

$scope.<the_string> = "something".

However, if the string contains one or more dots I want to split it and actually "drill down" into the scope. So 'foo.bar' should become $scope.foo.bar. This means that the simple version won't work!

// This will not work as assigning variables like this will not "drill down"
// It will assign to a variables named the exact string, dots and all.
var the_string = 'life.meaning';
$scope[the_string] = 42;
console.log($scope.life.meaning);  // <-- Nope! It is not there.

When reading a variable based on a string you can get this behavior by doing $scope.$eval(the_string), but how to do it when assigning a value?

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1 Answer

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This is the solution I have found is to use $parse, if anyone has a better one please add a new answer to the question!

Here is the example:

var the_string = 'life.meaning';
var model = $parse(the_string);  // Get the model
model.assign(scope, 42);  // Assigns a value to it
scope.$apply();  // Apply it to the scope
console.log(scope.life.meaning);  // Logs 42
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