Is there a pretty print for PHP?

Question

I'm fixing some PHP scripts and I'm missing ruby's pretty printer. i.e.

require 'pp'
arr = {:one => 1}
pp arr

will output {:one => 1}. This even works with fairly complex objects and makes digging into an unknown script much easier. Is there some way to duplicate this functionality in PHP?

Answer 1

How about print_r?

http://www.php.net/print_r

Answer 2

Both print_r() and var_dump() will output visual representations of objects within PHP.

$arr = array('one' => 1);
print_r($arr);
var_dump($arr);

Answer 3

For simplicity, print_r() and var_dump() can't be beat. If you want something a little fancier or are dealing with large lists and/or deeply nested data, Krumo will make your life much easier - it provides you with a nicely formatted collapsing/expanding display.

Answer 4

error_log(print_r($variable,true));

to send to syslog or eventlog for windows

Answer 5

If you're doing more debugging, Xdebug is essential. By default it overrides var_dump() with it's own version which displays a lot more information than PHP's default var_dump().

There's also Zend_Debug.

Answer 6

For PHP, you can easily take advantage of HTML and some simple recursive code to make a pretty representation of nested arrays and objects.

function pp($arr){
    $retStr = '<ul>';
    if (is_array($arr)){
        foreach ($arr as $key=>$val){
            if (is_array($val)){
                $retStr .= '<li>' . $key . ' => ' . pp($val) . '</li>';
            }else{
                $retStr .= '<li>' . $key . ' => ' . $val . '</li>';
            }
        }
    }
    $retStr .= '</ul>';
    return $retStr;
}

This will print the array as a list of nested HTML lists. HTML and your browser will take care of indenting and making it legible.

Answer 7

Since I found this via google searching for how to format json to make it more readable for troubleshooting.

ob_start() ;  print_r( $json ); $ob_out=ob_get_contents(); ob_end_clean(); echo "\$json".str_replace( '}', "}\n", $ob_out );

Answer 8

Wow, I already answered this. I really should keep better track of where I've been!