926189 - Variables View: String display mustn't strip special characters such as line breaks

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1258584

(DevTools :: Object Inspector, defect)

Description

[Till Schneidereit [:till]]

Somewhat similar to bug 868276, but while \t is at least displayed (as whitespace) when editing the string, \n and \r just get stripped completely.

For comparison, Chrome shows a character similar to "⏎" for \n and \r\n, (I guess) four spaces for \t, and strips \r.

Comment 1

[Brandon Benvie [:benvie]]

Another option would be to just show whitespace characters (besides regular spaces) as their escaped representation e.g. "\n" for newline.

Comment 2

[Till Schneidereit [:till]]

Would we then show the escaped versions with a leading "\\"? That'd work, I guess, and make them directly copyable as JS string literals.

Comment 3

[Brandon Benvie [:benvie]]

Yeah I guess we'd also have to escape actual backslashes. This is what node.js's REPL does. It also escapes quotes as necessary, so every string is copy pastable as valid js code to make that string. `string.toSource()` does that for us here, so that would be a simple way to accomplish this.

Comment 4

[Brandon Benvie [:benvie]]

Since toSource shows all primitives as objects (bug 879554) you have to do  `string.toSource().slice(12, -2)`.

Comment 5

[Tom Tromey :tromey]

Closing this one as a dup since the other one has the start of a patch.