How can one inspect JavaScript objects?

You can use JSON.stringify function. For instance: console.log(JSON.stringify(object)); If you need indentation for better readability (much like PHP's `print_r()`) you can make use of the 3rd argument: console.log(JSON.stringify(object, null, 4));

console.log(object) should give you what you need: http://cl.ly/4108422d3F1V1d2O3W0K this is the corresponding code: var obj = { first_name:"Bogdan", last_name:"Lazar", sayHello: function(){ alert(this.first_name + ' ' + this.last_name + ' says hello!'); } } console.log(obj);

If your objective is to inspect the object in order to see what it contains then use console.log(object); this will enable you to view what that object contains. If you want to print the object members as a string then you have no option but to stringify the object. However note that JSON.stringify will only consider the properties of the object and not functions. Alternatively you can write your own function to print the object contents and it should not be very difficult.

If printing to the console is not doing the job, you can try something like this: function logObject(obj, indentLevel) { indentLevel = +indentLevel || 0; var indent = (new Array(indentLevel + 1)).join(' '); Object.keys(obj).forEach(function (key) { if (obj[key] instanceof Array) { console.log(indent + key, ':', obj[key].join(', ')); } else if (typeof obj[key] === 'object') { logObject(obj[key], indentLevel + 2); } else { console.log(indent + key, ':', obj[key]); } }); } You could swap the console.log() calls for concatenation to a string if for example you wanted to output the object to an element in an HTML document.