There are various ways to dump information about a variable/object in PHP. Typically, you'd use them in a breakpoint-y fashion by inserting some dump function and hitting the endpoint to trigger the code.
You then hit the endpoint by curl-ing or visiting it, and you realize that the output is unreadable:
This happens because none of them formats the output for HTML rendering (as it shouldn't!), which makes it extra difficult to parse when you have a large object.
Here's how I make it pretty:
<?php
function d($obj): string {
return highlight_string("<?php\n" . print_r($obj, true) . "\n", true);
}
echo(d($dogsBySize));
This embeds the output of print_r inside highlight_string to make it render nicely:
It's a tremendous improvement in readability. If you want to skip having to echo() the output, make the function dump it directly instead of returning it:
<?php
function d($obj) {
highlight_string("<?php\n" . print_r($obj, true) . "\n", false);
}
d($dogsBySize);