How to stop a setInterval Loop in Javascript outside of code without refreshing the browser?

Question

This may be a quite naive question but I really need some help.

Prior to writing this post, I was programming on JSBin. Turns out without me realizing, I ran a setInterval loop prompting for userInput and it kept on looping, making me unable to click anywhere to change the code to fix the loop. It kept on repeating and repeating. It got to the point where I had to refresh and lose all my hard-written-code (I was not logged in, so my code was not saved)! I want to avoid that next time.

So, my question is how do I stop any such kind of setInterval Loops, so that I am able to access my code and change it and re-run it. Below is a code that demonstrates my issue, if you try running it on JSBin.com (obviously, it is not the code I wrote before). As you can see, I can not click on my code to change it (or save it) in any way, which means I lose all my code!

This may seem like a useless question, but I really want to know ways to fix it and perhaps fixing it from the developer tools will help me be familiar with the overwhelming set of tools it has :P. So please help me if you know a solution.

Thank you for taking your time to help me! I appreciate it.

setInterval(demo,1);
function demo()
{
     var name = prompt("Enter your name: ");
}

Answer 1

That's kind of a hack and should only be used in cases like the one exposed in OP but,
About all implementations use integers as timerid that just get incremented at every call.

So what you can do, is to clear all timeouts that were created on the page.
To do so you need to first get to which timerid we are, then call cleatTimeout or clearInterval (they do the same) in a loop until you reach the last call:

 function stopAllTimers() { const timerid = setTimeout(_=>{}); // first grab the current id let i=0; while(i < timerid) { clearTimeout(i); // clear all i++; } }; btn.onclick = stopAllTimers; // some stoopid orphan intervals setInterval(()=>console.log('5000'), 5000); setInterval(()=>console.log('1000'), 1000); setInterval(()=>console.log('3000'), 3000); const recursive = () => { console.log('recursive timeout'); setTimeout(recursive, 5000); }; recursive(); 

 <button id="btn">stop all timeouts</button> 

Answer 2

Assuming the dev tools are closed, hit esc and f12 nearly simultaneously. This should open the dev tools. If it doesn't keep trying until it does.

Once they are open, hit esc and f8 . Again, retry til it halts javascript execution at some arbitrary point in the code.

In the "sources" tab locate the generated script for what you wrote (offhand I don't know how it would look like from within JSBin) and literally delete the var name = prompt("Enter your name: "); line. Hitting f8 again will continue execution as if the "new" code is running. This should free you up to copy/paste your code from the site itself before you refresh the page

Answer 3

Another option is to search the developer tools "Elements" panel for the iframe (this should be doable even if the main document is unresponsive due to prompt 's blocking) - then, just right click the iframe element and remove it, no need to type any Javascript. (or, if you want you can select the iframe with querySelector and remove it, eg document.querySelector('iframe').remove() )