print_r into a variable
Posted by: Paul on: February 19, 2007
print_r is a great function. No matter how deeply nested your arrays are, print_r() will dump all the contents out into a neatly indented textual ouput for you to look at.
But what if you need to use the output of print_r() in a variable? Simply set the return flag like so:
$myVar = print_r($bigArray, true);
$myVar now contains the output of print_r().
Genius.
9 Responses to "print_r into a variable"
October 25, 2008 at 3:12 am
Exactly what I was looking for! Thanks for posting this! Genius, as you said it!
May 1, 2009 at 10:02 am
I know this post i so old now, but can you help me with this:
print_r(new MyClass()) prints the class variables and their values.
is there a straight forward way to get the class variables and their values? I want to do name=value pairs given that – very importantly – we do not know the variables in the class in the first place.
this could be due to an unknown base class, or the use of such a function
function addVar($name, $val)
{
$this->$name = $val;
}
May 4, 2009 at 10:09 am
Hi Jake,
I’ve never needed to do anything like what you’re after, but could you do something like:
$classStructure = print_r($myClass, 1);
and then write a function to parse the data inside $classStructure to extract the variable and / or method names?
Paul
[...] (Yes, I like print_r()) [...]
)
July 21, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Very helpful and straight to the point. Gave me what I wanted in a flash.