Visual Studio insert tabs/newlines in breakpoint print message (tracepoint)?

Question

Anyone know how to place a tab or newline into the print message of a breakpoint and have it show up correctly?

Thus far I've tried '\t' and '\n' which give the same thing in the debug output. I've also tried just putting in 4 spaces, but they get removed after I click OK in the 'When Breakpoint is Hit' dialog.

I'm using VS.NET 2008 with native code if that makes a difference.

Thanks.

Does this answer your question? [How to output new line in Visual Studio actions?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43464123/how-to-output-new-line-in-visual-studio-actions) — fkorsa, May 13 '20 at 08:55
See this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/43488943/4213607 — fkorsa, May 13 '20 at 08:56

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 07 '10 at 05:30

2

You can specify any character in the message by including it in curly braces. For example, this will insert new line in the message: {'\n'}. The problem is that character's value and single quotes will be printed, too. I tried to disable output of the character's value with all kinds of expression formatting, but nothing helps.

It is a bit clumsy solution, but it works if you need to break long statement into several lines. Other character are OK, as well. But don't put strings ({"\r\n"}). It seems that VS debugger is able to print only single characters, but string literals.

answered Sep 07 '10 at 05:30

Alex Blekhman

3,875
2
19
18

This does not work for me (using VS 2012). All that's printed is in fact the string representation of the character in single quotes (`'\n'`). I could live with the fact, that this shows up in **addition** to the desired line break. However, no line break is inserted at all. – IInspectable Dec 08 '14 at 16:27
@IInspectable, you're right. It seems they fixed it. I tried with VS2013 and it doesn't work anymore. – Alex Blekhman Dec 08 '14 at 23:09

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 06 '15 at 15:47

0

In VS2010 you can paste in a tab you have copied into the "Print a message" edit box.

answered Mar 06 '15 at 15:47

Serge

1

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Dec 28 '16 at 13:03

The only way I was able to create a newline in tracepoint output was as follows:

Create the tracepoint with a placeholder marker for the newline, e.g. BREAKME;
Export the breakpoint into XML (see also MSDN How to: Import and Export Breakpoints);
Manually edit the XML and replace BREAKME with a CDATA escape, with newline(s) you wanted instead of the marker:
```
&lt;![CDATA[

]]>
```
Remove the tracepoint from your breakpoints and re-import the XML.

OTOH, if you use the result for later text processing, you can auto-replace your marker at the later stages, and save yourself the steps 2-4...

Disclaimer/disclosure: I use Visual Studio at Microsoft, but I don't develop Visual Studio itself; what I write here isn't endorsed by Microsoft and expresses my private opinions only, etc.

Visual Studio insert tabs/newlines in breakpoint print message (tracepoint)?

3 Answers3