How do you show raw string values in Autos, Locals, or Watch windows?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Israel
  • Start date Start date
I

Israel

I always get annoyed with the fact that the debugger (in 2005) started
displaying text with escape sequences instead of the real value of the
text e.g. "C:\temp\file.txt" shows as "C:\\temp\\file.txt". I
couldn't seem to find any place to change this and any searches on
these groups didn't seem to turn up anything.
I'm I the only one who can't stand this? Especially when there are
lots of slashes, braces or quotes.
 
If it didn't do that, how would you know the difference between a string  
containing (for example) a backslash followed by the letter n and a string  
containing a newline character?  Both would be displayed the same.

I suspect you are in fact the only one, or at least one among very few,  
who can't stand this.  Quoting display of strings in the debugger is an 
important aspect to presenting the information in an unambiguous way.

Pete
Click to expand...

Everyone that I work with feels the same way. We came from C++ where
the strings displayed in the debugger were the raw strings and I just
figured everyone that came from a C++ background would feel the same
way.
The debugger would display the literal string “\n” as just “\n” anda
newline as the standard non-printable box. Of course with C++ strings
I could always look at the byte value easily enough by treating it as
a char array and see that there was an ASCII character 10 vs. a 8 or
something else.
I don’t have a problem with having the option of viewing it with
escape characters. I don’t even have a problem with that being the
default. I’d just like an option to view it in raw format sometimes
because it often hurts my head when I’m trying to validate in memory
data or SQL that’s about to be sent to the database and it always
takes me more than a few seconds to parse the text in my head to make
sure it’s correct.
 
Back
Top