Working on web apps I find myself using the print_r command a lot, and I mean a lot. It helps trace out what data is going where, and more often what’s not going where it’s supposed to.
A few months ago I realized that I type this same bit of code way too often.
echo '<pre>'; print_r($variable); echo '</pre>'; die();
Does a nice job of wrapping the output in<pre> tags making it easier to trace through. But too much typing for as many times as I use it. So I spent 2 minutes kicking out a function named pre_r that does it for me.
/** * Wrapper for print_r with pre tags * @param mixed $data What to display * @param boolean $die Whether the function should die() at the end */ function pre_r($data, $die=false) { echo '<pre>'; print_r($data); echo '</pre>'; if ($die) { die(); } }
Smart. I find myself doing this all the time as well. I’m going to add it to my “bag of tricks”.