I'm not sure exactly what either the API or the GUI should look like, but developers like me could really benefit from a way to pretty-print JS stacks. It's important that the API not require an Error object, since I want to use serialized stacks from other contexts (in particular, stacks generated on the server-side). Maybe an API like this? console.logException(label, stack); would put the label in the console, with a little arrow to the left of it, and when you click on the arrow the stack is shown, pretty-printed. So, a call like this would make sense in the console: try { foo } catch(e) { console.logException(e.name + ": " + e.message + " at " + e.fileName + ":" + e.lineNumber, e.stack); }

Thanks for filing this, Wes. Based on your description in IRC I was under the impression you were looking for something that could pretty-print any arbitrary JSON string in the console. Maybe you want a console.logJSON(label, jsonString)?

I think we can detect that there is an exception being logged - in which case we can pass it off to a prettyPrint function.

robcee -- I was thinking specifically of stacks, although pretty-printing JSON objects would be useful, too (the inspector handles actual objects okay). ddahl - while detecting that we are logging an exception and pretty printing it would be extremely useful, there are use-cases where you can't robustly detect it; this is why I suggested a specialized API. These cases involve situations where the exception object has already been serialized before it is dumped to the console. This can happen when the error is remote and communicated to the web front-end via JSON IPC. "Remote" could be another window, some kind of future sandbox, a worker thread, or a server-side process (my application).

triage. Filter on PINKISBEAUTIFUL

Jeff, does console.trace() and/or console.error() solve this use case? I'm not sure I understand exactly what this bug is requesting.. maybe you do since you did the last triage.

(In reply to Brian Grinstead [:bgrins] from comment #5) > Jeff, does console.trace() and/or console.error() solve this use case? I'm > not sure I understand exactly what this bug is requesting.. maybe you do > since you did the last triage. Yup, thanks for the nudge.