If you’ve worked in PHP, you know that debugging things in the middle of website code can be tedious. If you want to echo out a variable or boolean in a spot that isn’t visually accessible, then you will have a frustrating time viewing the source each page refresh.
A convenient way around this is to create a helper method that returns preformatted text. Ideally you want to define this in a global spot that you can call from anywhere (such as functions.php if you are using WordPress).
function pk_print($input){ echo '<pre>'; print_r($input); echo '</pre>'; }
Then to call it in our code, we would reference with:
pk_print($my_var);
What this does is it uses php’s “print_r” method that dumps out any information in the variable in a preformatted block that is indented and sectioned off. This goes for strings, objects, arrays, etc. So if I had an array such as:
$my_arr = array('red', 'yellow', 'blue');
Echoing this out will only return “Array”. Now if you use the new “pk_print” method we created like so:
pk_print($my_arr);
The result will be a much better, more informative piece of debug information.
It’s a small snippet, but it can save you a lot of time and repeat coding!