Question

I’m trying to get the name of the currently running function. From what I’ve read, this should be possible using:

(arguments.callee.toString()).match(/function\s+(\[^\s\(]+)/)

However, when I run this in Firefox and Safari (latest versions on Mac) the name is not returned.

console.log( arguments.callee ) returns the source of the function, but not the assigned name. arguments.callee.name returns an empty string.

My sample code is as follows:

var testobj = {
    testfunc: function(){
        console.log( (arguments.callee.toString()).match(/function\s+(\[^\s\(]+)/) );
    }
}
testobj.testfunc();

Answer 1

The typical arguments.callee hacks don’t work here because what you’ve done is assigned an anonymous function as the value for the object’s ‘testfunc’ key. In this case the hacking even gets worse, but it can be done, as follows:

var testobj = {
    testfunc: function(){
      for (var attr in testobj) {
              if (testobj[attr] == arguments.callee.toString()) {
                  alert(attr);
                  break;
                }
            }
    }
}
testobj.testfunc();