What's the JavaScript equivalent of Ruby's "inspect"?

Question

In Ruby, you can do foo.inspect and it outputs something sane for any object pretty much regardless of type.

How do I achieve the same thing in JavaScript?

Answer 1

JSON.stringify(foo) works pretty well.

Answer 2

This is possibly not the entirely general answer you're hoping for, since this introduces third-party dependencies into you application. However, they're worth mentioning:

• For applications using Prototype (link) you can use Object.inspect (link)
• For applications using jQuery (link) there's the jquery-inspect (link) plugin