Re: Best way to inspect the contents of a big variable?

The best way to view something that large would probably be to dump the 
value to a file and look at it in an editor.  To do that, you'll need to 
do a few /evald commands, which execute script in the context of Venkman 
itself.

First, get the variable you want into a $[n] variable, by evaling it 
while stopped...
/eval document.getElementById("apis").innerHTML
 > $[0] = [string] 73078 characters

(you don't actually need the /eval there, since it's the default command)

Then, use a few /evalds to create a file and spew your data...
/evald myfile = fopen("/home/rginda/foo.html", ">");
/evald myfile.write($[0].stringValue);
/evald myfile.close();

It wouldn't be very hard to wrap this functionality in a plugin (or, at 
patch to venkman itself), to add a ``/save-expr <file-name> 
<expression>'' command.

If you really wanted to dump the contents of that variable to the 
Interactive Session window, you could just increase the maxStringLength 
preference with the /pref command.  It's 4000 by default.  To change it 
to 75000, you'd type /pref maxStringLength 75000.  I don't know how long 
it'll take to render that many characters in the Interactive Session 
view though, so I wouldn't recommend it.


Rob.


Paul Rempel wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm using Venkman and find it incredibly useful.  But i'm not sure how to
> "see" what is inside of certain variables that contain a lot of data.
> 
> For example, my web page uses javascript to pupulate a <div> tag.  I can't
> see whats in it by using View-->Source since it only exists in memory.
> 
> I put a breakpoint in my .js file using Venkman, and then in the debugger
> console, I type:
> 
> document.getElementById("apis").innerHTML
> 
> but it doesn't show me the contents, it only says:
> 
>  $[0] = [string] 73078 characters
> 
> What if i want to see what those 73078 characters actually are????  Adding
> it as a watch produces the same problem.
> 
> 
> I tried sending it to an alert() dialog box, but it doesn't all fit and you
> can't copy and paste from those dialog boxes either.
> 
> 
> Any ideas???
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Paul
> 
>