Viewing complete strings while debugging in Eclipse

Question

Quick question:

While debugging Java code, Strings show up only till a certain length, after which Eclipse shows "..."

Is there any way to inspect the entire string? (This eases the pain of adding logging statements for debugging everywhere)

Answer 1

In the Variables view you can right click on Details pane and select "Max Length..." popup menu. The same length applies to expression inspector popup and few other places.

Answer 2

If you have a really long string, I use a different strategy: dump it to a file. I have a snippet of code I use in the Display view, which is evaluated to dump the data to a file. I use Commons IO, but you can do it with JDK only methods.

org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils.writeStringToFile(new java.io.File("<filename>"), <expression to evaluate>);

Naturally, you will need the Commons IO JAR in your classpath for that to work. If you don't, resort to JDK work.