More readable output formats

[expressjs]

More readable output formats

[dougwilson]

Hi @rightaway !

It would be more readable, especially for larger objects, if it were pretty-printed instead of on one line and no indentation like above.

We already do this, as far as I know. The string we provide is simply the output of util.inspect from Node.js core (https://nodejs.org/api/util.html#util_util_inspect_object_options). The exact string you are going to get back will of course depend on the version of Node.js you are running on, but the current versions will automatically detect how long the output is and include line breaks as appropriate. You can see this effect with the following:

$ node -pe 'require("util").inspect({a: "a", b: [ { c: "c" } ]})'
{ a: 'a', b: [ { c: 'c' } ] }

$ node -pe 'require("util").inspect({a: "a", b: [ { c: "c" }, { d: "d" }, { e: "e" }, { f: "f" } ]})'
{ a: 'a',
  b: [ { c: 'c' }, { d: 'd' }, { e: 'e' }, { f: 'f' } ] }

$ node -pe 'require("util").inspect({a: "a", b: [ { c: "c" }, { d: "d" }, { e: "e" }, { f: "f" }, { g: "g" }, { h: "h" } ]})'
{ a: 'a',
  b:
   [ { c: 'c' },
     { d: 'd' },
     { e: 'e' },
     { f: 'f' },
     { g: 'g' },
     { h: 'h' } ] }

As for your second question, regarding throw Error({a: 'a', b: [ { c: 'c' } ]}), there is nothing we can do about this. It's actually how JavaScript works. The first argument to Error is message, which is converted to a string during the Error object construction (done by String("throw Error({a: 'a', b: [ { c: 'c' } ]})"), which results in [object Object]). The actual object is no longer available for us to display to you because of this.