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Thursday, February 9. 2006dBug - var_dump with style!
 When it comes to debugging PHP applications most developers fall into one of two camps. They either use a package such as Zend Debugger, set breakpoints and painstakingly go through their code checking the variable values. Or alternatively for those of you not using $200 worth of IDE, and a common method employed by more php 'beginners', they will print_r() and var_dump() all over the place to check what is going on, the resulting dumps appearing inline with the rest of the site.
Personally, I use both methods, and I imagine most other developers are in the same boat. When you need a quick variable output or to see the full contents of an array you often can't beat var_dump for speed of implementation. Which is why this superb little class file that was recently bought to my attention (thanks Chris!) should be of interest to you all.
The power of dBug is best demonstrated with an example. To dump the value of a simple string you just do the following: [geshi lang=php] [/geshi]But it comes into power when you start dumping arrays and other complex data. The screen shot at the top of this article is the output from dumping a multi-dimensional array. As you can see the array is a lot easier to read than a standard var_dump. However dBug doesn't end there, it can also pretty-up the display of objects, images, mysql result sets and XML data. The XML dump in particular being very impressive indeed. The image below shows a MySQL result set dump: 
The table colours are controlled by a simple style sheet, so you can change them as you see fit. You can also click on the table elements to collapse them, for example a nested array could be very large in size, but clicking it will collapse that element of it. Very useful if you've called dBug many times on the same page. You can also force the output type if you need it via an optional second parameter to the constructor. If you spend a lot of time writing PHP code then you are sure to find a use for this class. Remember not to leave it enabled on a live/production web server though, and if you do use it be sure to send an email of thanks to the author Kwaku Otchere. Documentation, examples and a download can be found at: http://dbug.ospinto.com Trackbacks
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dBug looks nice but from practical point of view its ballast. I prefer Xdebug (http://www.xdebug.org/), no additional includes to worry about and var_dump will provide a nice enaough output if Xdebug is installed.
regards,
iges.
#1
on
2006-02-10 12:05
I use NuSphere's dbg integrated with PhpED (http://www.nusphere.com). Xdebug is also nice. Printing out the variables is certainly a way for debugging and probably cheap one too, however, how would you debug a web service together with the client sending SOAP requests to it? I think there are certain limitations to echo/print type of debugging or at least at some point it becomes prohibitevely slow.
#1.1
on
2006-02-10 17:15
Another utility is http://www.debugconsole.de/
#2
on
2006-02-10 19:32
I personally use my own debugging function:
function d($dump){
print "";
var_dump($dump);
print "";
}
Simple and easy to call. You get used to deciphering var_dumps after a while. PHPEd also tends to pick up some errors for me.
There's also the PEAR::Var_Dump class (http://pear.php.net/package/Var_Dump/), that can produce different kinds of output (table, text, XML, (X)HTML, ...)
The output is basically the same, it just lacks the pretty MySQL result set display...
Very useful tool. I am already using it my apps. I recommend this to everyone that needs a better var_dump
Check out Krumo - it is open-source, it's free and it offers a very nice and graceful way to dump your data. It is skinnable, it has DHMTL tree which takes less space, it can be used for both PHP4 and PHP5. Share if you have any ideas about improving it :)
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