Since Lawrence doesn’t work at Sun any more, I’ll swipe a blog entry of his to make sure it stays available.

A tip from Lawrence Crowl:

One of the problems with debugging C++ programs is that they have many user-defined types. The debugger typically does not know anything about those types, and so cannot provide any high-level printing of those types. Instead, the debugger prints the types’ representations.

For example, consider a simple C++ standard string.

#include <string>
    #include <iostream>

    int main() {
        std::string variable( "Hello!" );
        std::cout << variable << std::endl;
    }

In dbx, the result of printing variable is:

(dbx) print variable
    variable = {
        __data_   = {
            __data_ = 0x41260 "Hello!"
        }
        npos      = 0
        __nullref = 0
    }

Not nice.

The Sun dbx debugger provides a helpful facility for up-leveling the printout. This facility is called pretty printing.

We can help dbx by defining a pretty printing call-back function. In essence, we write a function that converts from our high-level type into a char*. Dbx will look for pretty printing functions with the name db_pretty_print and a first parameter that is a pointer to the high-level type. In our example, the function is:

char* db_pretty_print( std::string* var_addr, int, char* ) {
        return const_cast< char* >( var_addr->data() );
    }

(The second and third parameters are not needed in this example.)

Now, with the -p flag on the dbx print command line, dbx calls the pretty-printing function and uses the result for its output.

(dbx) print -p variable
    variable = Hello!

You can make pretty printing the default by executing

dbxenv output_pretty_print on

either in the debugger or in your ~/.dbxrc. Once pretty printing is the default, you can print the type’s representation with the +p flag.

(dbx) print +p variable
    variable = {
        __data_   = {
            __data_ = 0x41260 "Hello!"
        }
        npos      = 0
        __nullref = 0
    }

For more information, type “help prettyprint” within dbx.