PHP Debugging Followup - The dump function

Submitted by mikehostetler on Mon, 02/19/2007 - 12:24

I was in some old code this weekend and found another little PHP debugging gem. I had another version of a dump function that I used a long time ago, but stole this one from the Zend Framework because it was better. So, use this as a replacement for print_r() or var_dump().

Check out the function after the jump.

<?php
/**
* Stolen from the Zend Framework
* http://framework.zend.com/developer/browser/trunk/library/Zend.php
*/
function dump($var, $label=null, $echo=true)
{
    // format the label
    $label = ($label===null) ? '' : rtrim($label) . ' ';

   

// var_dump the variable into a buffer and keep the output
    ob_start();
    var_dump($var);
    $output = ob_get_clean();

   

// neaten the newlines and indents
    $output = preg_replace("/]\=\>\n(\s+)/m", "] => ", $output);
    if (PHP_SAPI == 'cli') {
        $output = PHP_EOL . $label
                . PHP_EOL . $output
                . PHP_EOL;
    } else {
        $output = '<pre>'
                . $label
                . htmlentities($output, ENT_QUOTES)
                . '</pre>';
    }

    if (

$echo) {
        echo($output);
    }
    return $output;
}
?>
Blog Topics: 
PHP
debug
zend