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 calluserfunc_array I’ve implemented my 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.