Having to maintain a massive Object Oriented web application written in PHP, it’s amazing how many times I’ll have to use the same functions over and over again in multiple different places. I’m listing them down here before I forget.
error_log($message)
The most used one, and the only way I can print anything right now in the application I’m working on without screwing up everything. It prints out the message into the application error log, which I then tail -f and keep it running in one monitor. Way to go multiple monitors.
get_class($object)
How do I live without this. Even with the power of IDE ( I’m using NetBeans ), it’s frustrating sometimes to find out what the class of the object actually is. Especially in “well designed” object oriented application full of decorator and factories, it’s easy to get lost. get_class() produce the exact class of the object. Can’t live without this function.
var_export($object, $return=false)
var_dump() used to be my ultimate savior, but with the limitation on the printing into the web without breaking anything, I’ll have to print everything to the log file. var_export() does exactly that when the “return” flag is set to true. Although most of the times it ended up with recursion error, it’s still pretty useful.
Exception()->getTraceAsString()
Got to find the way to trace where something started. Pretty straight forward when combined with var_export() and error_log() as mentioned in one of the brilliant StackOverflow answer.
$e = new Exception;
error_log(var_export($e->getTraceAsString(), true));
What are your favorite debugging snippets in PHP?
Phelio Gnomi 