an Object and got its class name @ its hexadecimal hashcode? Have you ever System-d dot out Chances are: it wasn’t what you were hoping for and it didn’t you help much. The problem is that, in Java, we lack a function which generates a good and consistent textual representation for any Java object. If we had it, we would write: System.out.println( .apply(myObject) ); toString instead of System.out.println( myObject**.toString()** ); // finger crossed, we// have a good toString. We would then stop cursing at developers for not implementing a damn good . toString is easy, if you decide to ignore a few edge cases. Hacking a universal toString It just requires you to use the reflection API to iterate over all the object’s fields to print them. that you can use with , with and in any Java 8 program. I wrote one Nashorn jjs nudge4j It’s written as a Nashorn JavaScript function. The function pretty much delegates all of the work to the poorly named (part of ). ReflectionToStringBuilder Apache Commons Lang You don’t need Apache Commons Lang in your classpath (I don’t have it either). I hate dependencies and I am not going to ask you to add it just for this. The code comes with to load it on demand from the maven repo. a good trick How do we use the toString function ? In Nashorn jjs and nudge4j you load it and you are ready to go: load(" ")toString(java.lang.Thread.currentThread()); https://gist.githubusercontent.com/lorenzoongithub/d1a7e047b29aef79d363b3b56c2e666a/raw/c486452e25d0f419101ae7bddd259240b17f1762/toString.js In Java you need to write a bit of boiler plate to wrap it up as a Java Function: Function<Object, String> toString = new Function<Object,String>() {private ScriptEngine engine; {try {engine = new ScriptEngineManager().getEngineByName("JavaScript");try (InputStream is = new URL(" ").openStream()) { https://gist.githubusercontent.com/lorenzoongithub/d1a7e047b29aef79d363b3b56c2e666a/raw/c486452e25d0f419101ae7bddd259240b17f1762/toString.js engine.eval(new InputStreamReader( is, StandardCharsets.UTF\_8)); } } catch (ScriptException | IOException e) { throw new RuntimeException(e); } } public String apply(Object oj) {try {return ""+((Invocable)engine).invokeFunction("toString", oj);} catch (NoSuchMethodException | ScriptException e) {throw new RuntimeException(e);}}}; System.out.println(toString.apply(Thread.currentThread())); : a universal function to stringify any Java Object. And that’s it It won’t have an impact on your day to day work but it might turn handy on one of those days. debugging Debug less. loading toString.js in nudge4j
