Ash Searle’s Blog

Like most developers, I often find it useful to spit out a few messages in the middle of a PHP script - especially when I’m debugging some problems.

Sadly, after only a few months our pristine code-base has become spotted with this, over and over again:

if (DEBUG) {
    echo "New user object: "; var_dump($user); echo "\n”;
}

After discovering var_export I felt like I’d improved things by switching to:

if (DEBUG) {
    printf("New user object: %s\n”, var_export($user, true));
}

I still didn’t like the fact that if (DEBUG) was appearing all over the place. So, after stumbling across call_user_func_array I’ve implemented by own debug function:

function debug()
{
    if (DEBUG)
    {
	$args = func_get_args();
	$args[0] = "<pre>" . $args[0] . "</pre>\n";
	for ($i = 1, $l = count($args); $i < $l; $i++) {
	    $args[$i] = htmlspecialchars(var_export($args[$i], true));
	}
	call_user_func_array('printf', $args);
    }
}

Which means I can remove all the if (DEBUG) statements, leaving only:

debug("New user object: %s", $user);

I think that’s much cleaner.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 6:19 pm and is filed under PHP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.