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Comment by antichaos | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong with Firebug? I fail to find a better alternative for JS debugging.

I have run into problems in the past caused by forgetting to remove console.log() lines from my scripts. If the console wasn't open, then the scripts didn't work.

This isn't a huge problem or reason not to use Firebug (which I would be totally lost without), just something to be wary of.

You can solve(?) this by creating a dummy console.log object when one isn't already present, then throwing away all of the output.

if (window.console) console.log(...);

That really should be built in to console.log.

I may not be entirely sober yet but I believe the problem at hand is what happens when window.console isn't defined at all.

It can be, but only if console.log is defined in your source code. It isn't when you use Firebug, so it won't be when you're not using Firebug.

    if(!console)console={log:function(){}};

You're welcome.

This will throw if console is not defined. Try

   if (!window.console)

   if (typeof console == 'undefined')

   if !('console' in window))

 N

Doesn't here. What are you using?

My solution to this issue was to write a console2.log helper function and call that instead of the original console.log:

  var console2 = {
   log: function(msg){
    if(typeof console != 'undefined'){
     console.log(msg);
    }
   }
  }

if(!window.console){window.console = {};} if(!(toString(window.console.log) === '[object Function]')) {window.console.log = function(){};}

there, fixed..

This won't work in node. That's not a huge deal, but it's pretty simple to come up with a cleaner solution that works in all environments.

Chrome Dev Tools.

Yea those have some fancy live JS editing capability, where you can edit the JS, it runs the code with the changes but without restarting the whole program.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH7sJbyXHuk

Last time I used firebugs you couldn't really edit files in it, it was also missing many goodies for easily browsing code or code completion.

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