Is there a toString-like function for javascript objects?

Question

While debugging and developing with javascript, I often wanted to alert the objects, so I used the below code:

for(a in obj)
{
  alert(a +' = '+obj[a])
}    

It serves well, but it is too annoying. I want to know if there is anything just like this for arrays:

var temp = ['a','b','c'];
alert(temp); // it will alert a,b,c 

So what I wish to do is:

var temp = {a:'a',b:'b',c:'c'};
alert(temp) ; // It should alert json {a:'a',b:'b',c:'c'}

Or any other better suggestion so I could look up the object easily.

Answer 1

Alert calls toString, so you can overwrite toString for debugging purposes:

Object.prototype.toString = function() {
    return JSON.stringify(this);
};

So you can just call alert(foo); and it will display the JSON representation of foo