macOS Better debugging "po" info?

It is "printing out". It's showing the first 5 bytes in hex:
i.e.

You should try an NSLog with a %@ format on the NSData before dropping into the debugger. So you know what NSData's -description method is likely to produce.

Maury said:

Oh, well this is very good news then. But shouldn't this be decoded by default?

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I don't see why. The debugger has no way of knowing what the text-encoding is. It could guess, but how? A plausible explanation for 'po' is that it calls the -description method, the same way %@ does in a format string.

I seem to recall it did that under gdb, that is, you got a string instead of hex.

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I'm not in a position to check this, but it seems unlikely to me. There's no way of knowing what the bytes in the NSData represent. It's just bytes. They could represent anything.

If gdb is guessing it's a string, and showing it that way, it's some special feature of gdb, because it would have to look at the bytes, guess an encoding, and then show the text. There may be other ways of printing arbitrary bytes as text in gdb, but 'po' doesn't seem like it (assuming it's implemented as %@ or -description). The NSData object certainly doesn't know if the bytes it holds are a string. It could be anything.