Does jQuery have a JSON/javascript object to HTML pretty print function similar to PHP's var_dump?

Question

Does jQuery have a JSON/Javascript object to HTML pretty print function similar to PHP's var_dump? If yes, what is it?

• Chris Wagner: Take a look at this SO Post stackoverflow.com/questions/323517/…
• artlung: possible duplicate of stackoverflow.com/questions/323517/…
• Fletcher Moore: I looked at that before I posted.

Answer 1

jQuery does not (out of the box).

However, James Padolsey created this prettyPrint which I really like.

Also, if you're using Firebug or Web Inspector (or similar), you can just type the object into the console, press return, and see a tree-dump of the object. To force a tree-view, call console.dir(obj)

Answer 2

Although the accepted answer is correct that jQuery does not have a pretty print feature for JSON, that feature is now included in out of the box javascript through JSON.stringify()'s space argument.

To print to HTML, wrapping the output with <pre> </pre> will preserve the line spacing for readability purposes.

var obj = {a:1, 'b':'foo', c:[false,'false',null, 'null', {d:{e:1.3e5,f:'1.3e5'}}]};
var str = "<pre>" + JSON.stringify(obj, undefined, 4) + "</pre>";
/* Returns
{
 "a": 1,
 "b": "foo",
 "c": [
 false,
 "false",
 null,
 "null",
 {
 "d": {
 "e": 130000,
 "f": "1.3e5"
 }
 }
 ]
}
*/

• Lee Taylor: The question was to pretty print HTML, not to pretty print JSON.
• Michael.Lumley: See the note below my answer.
• cjones26: I know this isn't the answer to the question but I like this rather than having to use some other dependency.

Answer 3

Using Jquery, you can have object.serialize() to output an object. This is similar to var_dump() in php or Zend_Debug::dump() in Zend.