Not understanding debugging, need more clarity on variable data

[mwaterous]

This page https://gohugo.io/templates/template-debugging/ recommends using printf to write variables to the screen in order to determine what values they contain.

I quite often do something very similar in PHP or JavaScript, where I dump an object using print_r(), or sometimes var_dump(), or console.log, or DevTools watch expressions, etc. These tools all provide me with valuable information.

Then there’s Go and Hugo. I try to see what’s in my $.Site.RegularPages variable and I get this:

*page.Pages{(*hugolib.pageState)(0xc000e11650), (*hugolib.pageState)(0xc000aad200), (*hugolib.pageState)(0xc0019b4a20), (*hugolib.pageState)(0xc001448ea0), (*hugolib.pageState)(0xc001c94ba0), (*hugolib.pageState)(0xc001c94de0), (*hugolib.pageState)(0xc001d77080), (*hugolib.pageState)(0xc0016dd4d0), (*hugolib.pageState)(0xc001974cc0), (*hugolib.pageState)(0xc000b0b440), (*hugolib.pageState)(0xc00092c1e0), (*hugolib.pageState)(0xc001448510), (hugolib.pageState)(0xc001448150), …

That… tells me nothing. What am I missing? How can I see what pages are contained with RegularPages?

At least with Menus, I can see there’s a menu called “main”, but not what’s actually in the main menu:

*navigation.Menus{“main”:navigation.Menu{(navigation.MenuEntry)(0xc002e9a0b0),…

I tried looping through Menus and sending . to printf, but I get the same references.

HEeeeeeEEEelp

[zzo]

Did you try to search prev post?
As far as I know, I think this is the best way

Easier Debugging Hugo Variables Using the Javascript Console

Using reusable partial for debugging that will create a script tag, jsonify the variable to be read and explored using the Javascript console in the browser. Normally when I want to debug a Hugo variable I use: {{ printf “%#v” $d }} Which is fine but hard to read. So instead I pass the variable to a partial to log it in the console. Example of a simple partial: <script> console.log('Hugo Debug: ', JSON.parse({{ jsonify . }})) </script> Using it in a template somewhere: {{ partial "conso…

[mwaterous]

Yes, I did try searching. Using both Google and the discourse search. Debugging is a fairly generic search term and even with multiple attempts using different combinations I didn’t turn up the page you linked to, thus why I posted here.

I did see another article suggesting console.log but all it did was dump the same data. It looks like the article you’ve referenced uses a slightly different tactic which may work better. I’ll give it a try.

[kaushalmodi]

You can use my debugprint partial from https://github.com/kaushalmodi/hugo-debugprint

It prints the debugged variables in a readable format as you see at the bottom of the page in https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/test/posts/keyword-collection/.

[mwaterous]

That is incredibly snazzy. I’m going to drop that in immediately and start messing around with it! Thanks!