aliased

Replace noisy Debug output with short, human-friendly aliases.

When you format!("{:?}", thing) and thing contains long opaque values (public keys, hashes, IDs), the output becomes unreadable. aliased lets you register aliases for specific values up front, then post-processes the Debug (or {:#?}) output to substitute those values with the aliases.

Two flavors

Selected via Cargo features. At least one must be enabled.

global (default)

A process-wide static AliasContext is used implicitly — nothing to thread through call sites.

use aliased::*;

#[derive(Debug)]
struct Key([u8; 32]);

Key::alias_prefix("K");

let a = Key([1; 32]);
let b = Key([2; 32]);
a.alias_named("alice");
b.alias_named("bob");

assert_eq!(format!("{:?}", (a, b).aliased()), "(⟪K|alice⟫, ⟪K|bob⟫)");

contextual

You pass an explicit &AliasContext to every call. Useful when you want isolated registries — for example, one per test.

use aliased::AliasContext;
use aliased::contextual::*;

let ctx = AliasContext::new();
// ...same API as global, but each method takes `&ctx`.

Enable in Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
aliased = { version = "0.1", default-features = false, features = ["contextual"] }
# or both:
aliased = { version = "0.1", features = ["contextual"] }

How it works

alias_named / alias_numbered store a mapping from the value's format!("{:?}", v) string to a chosen alias. When you print value.aliased(..), the crate formats value with Debug, then runs string substitution to replace each registered debug fragment with its alias.

Pretty-printed output ({:#?}) is handled by a per-key regex that tolerates the indentation {:#?} introduces, so nested values still get aliased. Replacements are applied longest-key-first to reduce the chance that a shorter registered value clobbers a longer one that contains it.

Features

Building with neither global nor contextual is a compile error.

When to use this

This is a debugging / logging aid. Substitution is roughly O(n × m) over the formatted string for every print — fine for logs, not for hot paths.

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0