JavaScript logging object with mutating state [duplicate]

Answer 1

I would solve this by making a "deep copy" of what you are logging, and passing the copy to console.dir(). Something like this works pretty well:

function deep_copy(ref)
{
    var r;
    var i;

    if(isHash(ref))
    {
        r = {};
        for(i in ref)
                r[i] = deep_copy(ref[i]);
    }
    else if(isArray(ref))
    {
        r = [];
        for(i = 0; i < ref.length; i++)
            r[i] = deep_copy(ref[i]);
    }
    else
    {
        r = ref;
    }

    return r;
}

If you don't want to bother with something like this, then using JSON.stringify is a great workaround and won't be much slower if it's native in the browser.

console.dir(JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(o));