Looking for an easier way to write debugging print statements in Java

Question

EDIT: I would love to read reactions to Steve Reed's AOP approach. Comments to his answer are encouraged!

I'm a novice, and at some point I realized it would be helpful to know the contents of a variable during program execution. So I started doing this:

EDIT: fixed this. Used to be: var + ": " + var, which was totally wrong. Dumb typo.

System.err.println ( "var: " + var );

Later I learned that this was common practice. At least, where a debugger was unavailable or unwanted.

I use a basic text editor, and typing the print statement every time I need to debug a variable is pretty tiresome, so I thought, why not something like this:

void dbug ( Object obj )
{
    String variableName = obj.somehowGetVariableName();
    String variableContents = obj.toString();
    System.out.println ( variableName +": " + variableContents );
}

But apparently getting the variable name is easier said than done.

java-reflection-how-to-get-the-name-of-a-variable

Am I stuck with:

System.err.println ( "var: " + var );

Or is there a popular shorthand version of this?

Answer 1

I think that System.err.format is what you want:

System.err.format("var: %s\n", var);

is a shorthand for:

System.err.println(String.format("var: %s", var));

Answer 2

If you use IntelliJ IDEA, you can use the "Live template" shortcut for printing to System.out such as soutp (and then a TAB) to debug the method parameters, soutv to trace the name of a variable along with it's value, etc.

To read the list of shortcuts\modify it, go to File->Settings->Live Templates->Output