debugging PHP

[DaveC426913]

How can I reliably debug PHP by displaying the contents of variables?

The pages I'm debugging are doing various things that might or might not generate an HTML page, redirect to another page or run a shell script. The very act of echo'ing a variable may mess with the operation of the script (especially if it hasn't printed the header yet).

While I'm at it, same question about shell scripting.

 

[sleipnir214]

Have you looked at the PHP function error_log() (

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.error-log.php)?

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[jpadie]

couple of ideas:

add

ob_start();

to the start of each page.

and then plug a footer or something with your variables output eg

function footer() {
  echo "<pre>";
  get_defined_variables();
  echo "</pre>";
}

 

[jpadie]

sorry - didn't read your post properly. the above only works with outputted web pages.

to cater to every solution you might want to push the output to a text file.

or as sleipnir214 says, use error_log (perhaps with a custom error handling function)