What's the javascript equivalent of ruby's "inspect"?

Question

In ruby, you can do foo.inspect() and it outputs something sane for any object pretty much regardless of type.

How do I achieve the same thing in Javascript?

Answer 1

Take a look at this:

http://jsclass.jcoglan.com/reflection.html

Did that help?

Answer 2

This is possibly not the entirely general answer you're hoping for, since this introduces third-party dependencies into you application. However, they're worth mentioning:

• For applications using Prototype (link) you can use Object.inspect (link)
• For applications using jQuery (link) there's the jquery-inspect (link) plugin