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17 years ago
Howdy!

I am working on a pretty large project where I needed to dump a human readable form of whatever into the log files... and I thought var_export was too difficult to read. BigueNique at yahoo dot ca has a nice solution, although I needed to NOT modify whatever was being passed to dump.

So borrowing heavily from BigueNique's (just reworked his function) and someone's idea over in the object cloning page, I came up with the following function.

It makes a complete copy of whatever object you initially pass it, including all recursive definitions and outside objects references, then does the same thing as BigueNique's function. I also heavily reworked what it output, to suit my needs.

<?php

function var_log(&$varInput, $var_name='', $reference='', $method = '=', $sub = false) {

    static $output ;
    static $depth ;

    if ( $sub == false ) {
        $output = '' ;
        $depth = 0 ;
        $reference = $var_name ;
        $var = serialize( $varInput ) ;
        $var = unserialize( $var ) ;
    } else {
        ++$depth ;
        $var =& $varInput ;
        
    }
        
    // constants
    $nl = "\n" ;
    $block = 'a_big_recursion_protection_block';
    
    $c = $depth ;
    $indent = '' ;
    while( $c -- > 0 ) {
        $indent .= '|  ' ;
    }

    // if this has been parsed before
    if ( is_array($var) && isset($var[$block])) {
    
        $real =& $var[ $block ] ;
        $name =& $var[ 'name' ] ;
        $type = gettype( $real ) ;
        $output .= $indent.$var_name.' '.$method.'& '.($type=='array'?'Array':get_class($real)).' '.$name.$nl;
    
    // havent parsed this before
    } else {

        // insert recursion blocker
        $var = Array( $block => $var, 'name' => $reference );
        $theVar =& $var[ $block ] ;

        // print it out
        $type = gettype( $theVar ) ;
        switch( $type ) {
        
            case 'array' :
                $output .= $indent . $var_name . ' '.$method.' Array ('.$nl;
                $keys=array_keys($theVar);
                foreach($keys as $name) {
                    $value=&$theVar[$name];
                    var_log($value, $name, $reference.'["'.$name.'"]', '=', true);
                }
                $output .= $indent.')'.$nl;
                break ;
            
            case 'object' :
                $output .= $indent.$var_name.' = '.get_class($theVar).' {'.$nl;
                foreach($theVar as $name=>$value) {
                    var_log($value, $name, $reference.'->'.$name, '->', true);
                }
                $output .= $indent.'}'.$nl;
                break ;
            
            case 'string' :
                $output .= $indent . $var_name . ' '.$method.' "'.$theVar.'"'.$nl;
                break ;
                
            default :
                $output .= $indent . $var_name . ' '.$method.' ('.$type.') '.$theVar.$nl;
                break ;
                
        }
        
        // $var=$var[$block];
        
    }
    
    -- $depth ;
    
    if( $sub == false )
        return $output ;
        
}

// var_log( $var, '$name' ) ;

?>

Hope it works well for you!
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