Not a log

A tiny (20-line) console interface that returns everything as a string

• Have you ever ask yourself if you could get the string value from console.table rather then dumping it out to the terminal?
• Have you thought about using columnify or table but didn't want to have a huge/large dependency to generate ascii tables?
• Do you want any of the other tools available on the console, like console.time, console.group or console.count to also return stuff as a string?

Turns out that you can (Just in NodeJS) by constructing a new Console that redirects stdout/stderr to a node stream that you can then read from. This package will do just that. This wraps all the console methods in a Proxy, read everything that was dumped to the stream and return what it just spit out as a string.

So to live up to it's name it dose not log anything to the terminal, it simply returns everything as a string 😁

Examples

Get a list of people and output the result to a http request

import http from 'node:http'
import logger from 'not-a-log'

// an array of objects
function Person(firstName, lastName) {
  this.firstName = firstName
  this.lastName = lastName
}

http.createServer((req, res) => {
  const john = new Person('John', 'Smith')
  const jane = new Person('Jane', 'Doe')
  const emily = new Person('Emily', 'Jones')
  const str = logger.table([john, jane, emily])
  res.end(str)
  /* what gets written
  ┌─────────┬───────────┬──────────┐
  │ (index) │ firstName │ lastName │
  ├─────────┼───────────┼──────────┤
  │    0    │  'John'   │ 'Smith'  │
  │    1    │  'Jane'   │  'Doe'   │
  │    2    │  'Emily'  │ 'Jones'  │
  └─────────┴───────────┴──────────┘
  */
}).listen(3000)

Getting the time in MS from console.time

import logger from 'not-a-log'
import fetch from 'node-fetch'

logger.time('download')

const res = await fetch('https://httpbin.org/get')
const arrayBuffer = await res.arrayBuffer()

const time = logger.timeEnd('download').split(': ')[1]

console.log(`Time it took to fetch stuff from httpbin was ${time}`)

Other stuff

import logger from 'not-a-log'

const stackTrace = logger.trace('Houston, we got a problem')

const count = logger.count('Made a request')

let str = logger.group('Something')
str += logger.log('Nested deeply')
str += logger.info('below, under `Something`')
logger.groupEnd('Something')

// You get the idea now, every method in console
// now returns what you dumped out as a string.