I typically just use uneval() to figure out what’s inside an array/object, but what about when it’s large and heterogeneous? I wanted to find a version of php’s print_r() for JavaScript. Here is link to the Original Version of dump() I based mine off of:

www.openjs.com/scripts/others/dump_function_php_print_r.php

When I tried it, the first thing I noticed what that it put quotes around everything, and that long strings with line breaks got messy, so I did a quick adaptation to suit my immediate needs and came up with this:

function dump(arr,level) {
  function magicquotes(value) { return (isNaN(value)) ? '"' + value.replace(/\n/g,"\n"+indent) + '"' : value; }
  level = level | 0;
  var indent = new Array(level+1).join("\t"), dumped_text = "";

  if(typeof(arr) == 'object') { //Array/Hashes/Objects
    for(var item in arr) {
      var value = arr[item];

      if(typeof(value) == 'object')
          dumped_text += indent + "'" + item + "' :\n" + dump(value,level+1);
      else
          dumped_text += indent + "'" + item + "' => " + magicquotes(value) + "\n";
    }
  } else { //Stings/Chars/Numbers etc.
    dumped_text = "===>"+arr+"<===("+typeof(arr)+")";
  }
  return dumped_text;
}

I also found links to many other print_r(), var_dump() equivalents, but they either depended on write, were overly complicated, or returned a lot of excess text I wasn’t interested in.

So why not just call it print_r ? Well, the original I copied was called dump, and I’ve always been annoyed typing that underscore, so I just didn’t change it.

Update: found another alternative. It’s really long and puts out a lot of extraneous information, but it’s worth looking at: wiki.greasespot.net/Code_snippets#Dump_the_properties_of_an_object