Bad idea to leave “console.log()” calls in your production JavaScript code?

Question

I have a bunch of console.log() calls in my JavaScript.

Should I comment them out before I deploy to production?

I\'d like to just leave them th

Answer 1

To my knowledge there is no shorter method of stubbing out console.log than the following 45 characters:

window.console||(console={log:function(){}});

That's the first of 3 different versions depending on which console methods you want to stub out all of them are tiny and all have been tested in IE6+ and modern browsers.

The other two versions cover varying other console methods. One covers the four basics and the other covers all known console methods for firebug and webkit. Again, in the tiniest file sizes possible.

That project is on github: https://github.com/andyet/ConsoleDummy.js

If you can think of any way to minimize the code further, contributions are welcomed.

-- EDIT -- May 16, 2012

I've since improved on this code. It's still tiny but adds the ability to turn the console output on and off: https://github.com/HenrikJoreteg/andlog

It was featured on The Changelog Show