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dumping php array data and debug_print_backtrace to a log March 17, 2009

Posted by chris in : rant , add a comment

By default you cannot write a print_r, var_dump, or debug_print_backtrace to a log in PHP. When you call these methods, PHP immediately echo’s out the data. Instead you must use PHPs ob_start which instructs PHP to not output anything from the script. To access the contents of the buffer use ob_get_contents and to let PHP know its okay to output from your script once again call ob_end_clean.

	ob_start();
	var_dump(debug_backtrace());
	$backtrace=ob_get_contents();
	ob_end_clean();

using php debug_print_backtrace for debugging code March 4, 2009

Posted by chris in : php , add a comment

This is a built-in PHP function that I can’t believe I didn’t learn about until just a few weeks ago. One of the developers at work was debugging an application that had a lot of includes and he called debug_print_backtrace(). It dumps out a nice array showing which files called a function, and what line number it occurs on.

See http://us2.php.net/debug_print_backtrace for more information.