29 December, 2006

workaround to make firebug console.log function bug free on IE

Firebug is very usefull for web development but its console only works great on Firefox for now.
If you want to keep console.log calls in your app event when your app is used on Firefox without the Firebug plug-in or on IE, you can add this line at the very first start of your JS code :

try { console.log('init console... done'); } catch(e) { console = { log: function() {} } }

This code tries to write some text in the Firebug console. If it fails (no Firebug plug in installed or under IE), it instantiate an object called 'console' that has a method called 'log' that does nothing !

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks a lot for this one it really helped! the problem was driving me nuts! ^_^

Kranium said...

Thanks so much for this solution to a rather annoying problem.

I've expanded it a little bit, because I also use asserts a lot to make sure code doesnt break when changes are made.

try { console.assert(1); } catch(e) { console = { log: function() {}, assert: function() {} } }

Also, this means that the check can be performed without logging a message to the console if it is active.

Ronny said...

I know this is old, but I'm researching solutions for this problem in the last week, and Clint's version is by far the best I've seen. Thanks!
I had elaborated it to allow more console APIs, so here goes:

try {
console.assert(1);
}
catch(e) {
console = {
log: function() {},
debug: function() {},
info: function() {},
warn: function() {},
error: function() {},
assert: function() {},
dir: function() {},
dirxml: function() {},
trace: function() {},
group: function() {},
groupCollapsed: function() {},
groupEnd: function() {},
time: function() {},
timeEnd: function() {},
profile: function() {},
profileEnd: function() {},
count: function() {},
exception: function() {},
table: function() {}
}
}