Test if Object Property Exists

I am working on a program that investigates the DOM object, mostly as a learning process for myself.

My program displays characteristics of an element that it finds, but in the DOM, the attributes ie 'Name' are not consistent for all types of elements (Tags).

Is there a test to check for the presence of a given property, method etc that I can make beforehand to avoid generating errors when I try to retrieve the data in a generalized routine?

It seems there would be a method that would apply to objects in general.

Thanks in advance.

You can use error trapping to ensure that the error doesn't crash your app, and then if an error occurs, print out something and then continue to the next attempt.

Yes, thought of that, just seems like a back door approach to what should be a common question when dealing with objects that are you are not real familiar with.

Well the developer's the only person that'll ever need to use them, so either get the spec. from the developer of the object, or early bind to the object if possible...

... of course, all this is academic if you use .NET because you can use xml web services ;)