Most modern browsers have a console in their developer tools, useful for this sort of debugging. console.log(myvar); Then you will get a nicely mapped out interface of the object/whatever in the console. Check out the console documentation for more details.
I really love var_export(). If you like copy/paste-able code, try: echo ‘<pre>’ . var_export($data, true) . ‘</pre>’; Or even something like this for color syntax highlighting: highlight_string(“<?php\n\$data =\n” . var_export($data, true) . “;\n?>”); Reusable function: function highlight_array($array, $name=”var”) { highlight_string(“<?php\n\$$name =\n” . var_export($array, true) . “;\n?>”); } You can do the same with print_r(). For … Read more
Try var_export You may want to check out var_export — while it doesn’t provide the same output as var_dump it does provide a second $return parameter which will cause it to return its output rather than print it: $debug = var_export($my_var, true); Why? I prefer this one-liner to using ob_start and ob_get_clean(). I also find … Read more
var_export or serialize is what you’re looking for. var_export will render a PHP parsable array syntax, and serialize will render a non-human readable but reversible “array to string” conversion… Edit Alright, for the challenge: Basically, I convert the output into a serialized string (and then unserialize it). I don’t claim this to be perfect, but … Read more