Flex/Actionscript 3: Debug Output to Console

I recently started messing around with the Flixel framework - something built on top of Flex to make retro games. One of the first things I noticed was how difficult it is to debug things - especially complex objects.

The first problem is capturing any debug output. For whatever reason, I was unable to output traces to anywhere useful. My first success was with using De MonsterDebugger to capture the output. While this was better than nothing, I needed very little of the functionality of De MonsterDebugger and it still didn’t give me what I really wanted: formatted console output.

print_r style output in actionscript

I found a good starting point here, but the output of this wasn’t exactly what I wanted. I messed around with it until I got something more familiar to me.

package learning {
  import org.flixel.*;

  public class Debugger {
    public static function pr(obj:*, level:int = 0, output:String = ""):* {
      var objtype:String = typeof(obj);
      if (objtype == "boolean" || objtype == "string" || objtype == "number") {
        return obj;
      }

      var tabs:String = "";
      for(var i:int = 0; i < level; i++) {
        tabs += "\t"
      }

      output += "{\n";
      for(var child:* in obj) {
        output += tabs +"\t["+ child +"] => ";

        var childOutput:String = pr(obj[child], level+1);
        if(childOutput != '') output += childOutput

        output += "\n";
      }
      output += tabs + "}\n";

      return output;
    }

    public static function log(obj:*):void {
      FlxG.log(pr(obj));
      // This is a flixel thing. If you're not using flixel
      // Just use trace(pr(obj));
    }
  }
}

Example output

{
    [0] => {
        [tile] => 4
        [rule] => {
            [0] => xxx
            [1] => x1x
            [2] => x1x
        }
    }
    [1] => {
        [tile] => 8
        [rule] => {
            [0] => x1x
            [1] => x1x
            [2] => xxx
        }
    }
}

trace output to console

This, fortunately, was much less of a hassle for me to get working.

Reference: Configuring the debugger version of Flash Player

Step 1

Locate/create your mm.cfg file. For me this was in ~/mm.cfg. See reference.

Stick this in it: TraceOutputFileEnable=1

Or, in one command:

echo "TraceOutputFileEnable=1" > ~/mm.cfg`

Step 2

Locate the location of the log file. Mine is in

~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/Logs/flashlog.txt`

See reference.

You don’t want to type this in every time you want to view the log, so add a function to your .bash_profile

This is what I have:

flashlog() {
  tail -f $* ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash\ Player/Logs/flashlog.txt;
}

Step 3

Start debugging!

$ flashlog -100
Warning: 'flash' has no property 'prototype'
Warning: 'flash' has no property 'prototype'
flixel v2.35 [debug]
----------------------------------------------------
{
  [0] => {
    [tile] => 4
    [rule] => {
      [0] => xxx
      [1] => x1x
      [2] => x1x
    }
  }
  [1] => {
    [tile] => 8
    [rule] => {
      [0] => x1x
      [1] => x1x
      [2] => xxx
    }
  }
}