Labeled ToString
Overview
The Labeled ToString project provides several traits you can mix into case classes in order to get toString
representations that include parameter labels. That means you get Person(name=John Doe,age=30) instead of Person(John Doe,30).
Example
Here's a normal case class:
case class Person(name: String, age: Int)
Person("John Doe", 30).toString
//result is "Person(John Doe,30)"
Here's our labeled case class:
import com.yuvimasory.tostring._
case class Person(name: String, age: Int) extends LabeledToStringDef
Person("John Doe", 30).toString
//result is "Person(name=John Doe,age=30)"
Installation
labeled-tostring is hosted on Maven Central. You can add it as a dependency to your build.sbt
file. It is built for Scala 2.8.0 through 2.9.2.
libraryDependencies += "com.yuvimasory" %% "labeled-tostring" % "0.5.0"
Choosing a trait
The com.yuvimasory.tostring
package provides three traits: LabeledToStringDef
, LabeledToStringVal
, and LabeledToStringLazyVal
. They override the default case class's toString
method with a def
, val
, and lazy val
, respectively.
- If you're not sure which to use, start with
LabeledToStringDef
, which works in all cases. - Consider
LabeledToStringVal
if you know the case class's parameters are either immutable (e.g., primitive types, immutable collections), or have string representations that never change (e.g., arrays). - Try
LabeledToStringLazyVal
if you meet the criteria forLabeledToStringVal
and want lazy initialization. - Both of the
*Val
traits may runtoString
much faster after the first call, since the store the result. The cost is a bit of memory and a slow initialtoString
call. - You must use
LabeledToStringDef
if your case classes are Squeryl tables. If you don't Squeryl will generate bogus SQL.
Benchmarks
Benchmarks are in a separate repository.
Object creation
[info] benchmark ns linear runtime
[info] CreateCaseClassPerson 6.66 =
[info] CreateLabeledToStringValPerson 1262.54 ==============================
[info] CreateLabeledToStringLazyValPerson 8.68 =
[info] CreateLabeledToStringDefPerson 6.63 =
First toString
call
We don't have a good way to benchmark this presently.
Subsequent toString
calls
[info] benchmark ns linear runtime
[info] SubsequentToStringsOfCaseClassPerson 750 ========
[info] SubsequentToStringsOfLabeledToStringValPerson 146 =
[info] SubsequentToStringsOfLabeledToStringLazyValPerson 185 ==
[info] SubsequentToStringsOfLabeledToStringDefPerson 2594 ==============================
Warning
- These traits produce unexpected strings in the REPL due to the way the REPL wraps code and mangles names.
- These traits do not work if you add bodies to your case classes (i.e., additional methods or fields).