PrettyObject

PrettyObject is a Java library that converts Java objects into human readable strings. PrettyObject heavily uses Java reflection API to dive deep into Java objects and extract every bit of information out of them. PrettyObject is inspired by Awesome Print.

Build

Run the following command

./gradlew build

on Unix like machines or

gradle.bat build

on Windows. This will generate a jar file inside build/libs directory. You should have JDK (>=1.5) installed. The script downloads all the requirements, including gradle, and build the library.

Example

An instance of the following class:

class Example {
    private String str = "string-field";
    Object nil = null;
    int i = 10;
    List<Object> list;
    Map<Object, Object> map;

    Example() {
        ArrayList<Object> arrayList = new ArrayList<Object>();
        arrayList.add("string-list-item");
        arrayList.add(123);
        arrayList.add(new int[]{10, 20, 30});
        this.list = arrayList;

        HashMap<Object, Object> map = new HashMap<Object, Object>();
        map.put(new Point(3, 4), 5);
        this.map = map;
    }
}

is printed as:

m3.prettyobject.examples.Example {
  str => "string-field",
  nil => null,
  i => 10,
  list => ArrayList {
    "string-list-item",
    123,
    [
      10,
      20,
      30
    ]
  },
  map => class java.util.HashMap {
    java.awt.Point {
      x => 3,
      y => 4
    } => 5
  }
}

See src/examples directory for more examples.

Warning

The generated output can be huge for some ordinary objects. For instance, pretty printing a new java.swing.JButton() results in about 173MB of output string! See the CanBeHuge example in the examples directory.