The browser console has a count method

Thursday, July 14th, 2022 at 10:30 pm

Count von count from Sesame Street

When debugging or analysing JavaScript, you often see people trying to find out how often a certain function is called. The common way to do that is to use a global counter variable to increment and log in the function.

var i = 0;
function test(){
  // other functionality
  i++;
  console.log(i);
  // other functionality
}

There is, however, a better method. The Console of the browser has a `count()` and `countReset()` method that event takes a label. That means you can avoid the global.

function bettertest(){
  console.count('bettertest');
}

You can see it in action in this screencast.

Screencast of the two ways to count how often a method was called in comparison

This is part of the standard Console API and should be supported in all browsers.

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The browser console has a count method

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