Question

I am writing a Google Chrome Extension and trying to make the transition to coding in HTML, CSS and Javascript from the kind of coding I did 40 years ago. It’s a big learning curve but a little bit of console logging would help a lot. (Who remembers the green phosphor displays on the old iron-core memory Sperry Univacs? Now there was a console that could tell you what was going on – mount a tape, change a diskpack or put more paper in the printer.) But I digress.

Just a few days ago, I was able to send messages to the Google Chrome DOM Inspector console log from my content script or background page like this:

console.log=”RECEIVED REQUEST FROM CONTENT SCRIPT PEEK.JS”;

Later if I inspected the page where that code was injected, I would see that exact same message on the console. If that line executed four times, I would see four instances of that messages in sequence on the console. It was simple but beautiful.

Now, nothing appears on the console unless I type in “console.log” and in this case I see only the last instance of the message. What’s the problem here? Did I toggle something off in the debugger? Am I writing the code wrong? Should it be: “console.log(“Message Here”);” – (this always returns an error) ?

I have spent literally hours trying to find the answer to this question and I can only surmise that the question is so simple that even a well-educated child could answer it. The alternative is to spend more hours trying to find my bugs thru implication or from alert messages. Better to spend my hours learning how to effectively use the inspector for debugging.

For example, yesterday after restructuring what was once working code so that it would pass an array to background from content instead of background requesting each item successively from content, the extension broke, as might be expected. The console displays one error message: “Error during tabs executeScript: Unknown error.” with a link that says “chrome/ExtensionProcessBindings:95” on the far right of that same line. Obviously the error message is almost useless. Clicking on the link brings me to the resources panel which displays a blank frame to the right with the words “background.html” This appears to be useless as well.

How is this information at all helpful? It took me another six hours to figure out that I had moved a variable definition to another place in the code so that it was not defined at the time the executeScript line was executed. Had the error message said that a parameter was undefined in executeScript, I could have found it in about ten minutes.

So back to the original question – I WANT A SIMPLE ANSWER – don’t tell me to write a function. I saw the console displaying what I wanted two days ago without writing any functions.

Answer 1

Here is your SIMPLE ANSWER: Instead of

console.log="RECEIVED REQUEST FROM CONTENT SCRIPT PEEK.JS";

You should use

console.log("RECEIVED REQUEST FROM CONTENT SCRIPT PEEK.JS");