I just grabbed the plugin from SVN. Cool stuff, but I had a problem. Your line 338 is the following:

window.console["_" + method]($.makeArray(arguments).join(” “));

This is concatenating all objects as strings, which results in a much less useful output in Firebug (e.g. no drilling on object properties). Furthermore, it nerfs all the standard Firebug output in the same way, since you’re redefining the console.* functions to do the same.

Instead, I changed it to the following and had good results:

window.console["_" + method].apply(this,arguments);

After this, Firebug works as expected. Thanks!

You’re right, my logic was flawed there a bit.

Passing this to a function in the global scope would just pass in a reference to the document object. Foolish me.

Glad you could see the practicality of what I was trying to do, though.

Best,

Mauvis

However, to argue the second point — being the passing of this to the log methods (or any of the methods) — your syntax is flawed. When you use the keyword this as a parameter to a function, the object that you pass in has already been de-referenced upon entry to the method. In your example, $(*).log(this), this refers to the context object at the point of invocation.

$("a").click(onClickHandler);
function onClickHandler(e){
  var x = this;
  var y = $(this).get(0);
  console.log(this, x, y);// you will get a log statement with three identical objects
  $(*).log(this, x, y);// you will get a log statement with three identical objects,
    //followed by the grouped log statements foreach element in $(*)
}

What you have to remember is that in the log method that I’ve defined on the jQuery object (and in fact, any JavaScript function at all), when you pass this as a parameter to a function, what the function gets is just a regular object. There is nothing special about this when used as a parameter. It is indistinguishable from x and y as used above. Therefore, there is no way to ‘change’ what this points to.

However, there is a way to hack it in. Currently, if you pass (as a string) to any of the log functions anything beginning with a dot, then jQuery.Firebug will assume you are attempting to reference a property or method on the jQuery object. For instance:

$(*).log(".length", ".attr('id')");

This statement would output the actual length of the jQuery selection as an integer, followed by the ID attribute of the first element of the jQuery selection, followed by the grouped output of each element in the jQuery selection. I believe this is exactly the kind of behavior you wanted. In order to add support for this as well, I would have to declare a special string parameter such as “this” or “[this]” or something similar.