is it possible to execute a portion of a php script to see what it does?

Question

i am pulling apart a third party shopping cart and they have included a bunch of junk (as usual) aside from having to remove and bring back pieces of code to see what it does. is it possible to execute a few lines?

although setting up comments on codes i dont want to execute sounds good which i just thought of :p

but what other things exist that you guys know of?

thanks

Answer 1

This may be obvious but you can use a debugger (eclipse php or netbeans) and just put breakpoints after certain parts and "run to" that portion of the code. From there you can evaluate variables and potentially see output as it happens.

Answer 2

Will codepad work ?

Answer 3

I don't know about codepad but I'm pretty sure Dreamweaver doesn't have a native PHP debugger built in. Take look at Xdebug or the Zend IDE.