Christian Heilmann

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.

Share on Mastodon (needs instance)

Share on Twitter

Newsletter

Check out the Dev Digest Newsletter I write every week for WeAreDevelopers. Latest issues:

160: Graphs and RAGs explained and VS Code extension hacks Graphs and RAG explained, how AI is reshaping UI and work, how to efficiently use Cursor, VS Code extensions security issues.
159: AI pipelines, 10x faster TypeScript, How to interview How to use LLMs to help you write code and how much electricity does that use? Is your API secure? 10x faster TypeScript thanks to Go!
158: 🕹️ Super Mario AI 🔑 API keys in LLMs 🤙🏾 Vibe Coding Why is AI playing Super Mario? How is hallucinating the least of our worries and what are rules for developing Safety Critical Code?
157: CUDA in Python, Gemini Code Assist and back-dooring LLMs We met with a CUDA expert from NVIDIA about the future of hardware, we look at how AI fails and how to play pong on 140 browser tabs.
156: Enterprise dead, all about Bluesky and React moves on! Learn about Bluesky as a platform, how to build a React App and how to speed up SQL. And play an impossible game in the browser.

My other work: