print_r into a variable

Posted by: Paul on: February 19, 2007

In: PHP
15 Comments

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.

15 Responses to "print_r into a variable"

1 | JP
July 21, 2008 at 3:13 pm

Very helpful and straight to the point. Gave me what I wanted in a flash. 😀

2 | Denis St-Michel
October 25, 2008 at 3:12 am

Exactly what I was looking for! Thanks for posting this! Genius, as you said it!

3 | sequoia mcdowell
April 24, 2009 at 2:51 am

Thanks!!

4 | Jake
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;
}

5 | Paul
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

6 | Jake
May 4, 2009 at 11:04 am

alright, guess that’s my only way. thanks! =)

7 | Drupal: Creating custom node templates « paul bennett
May 28, 2009 at 3:34 pm

[…] (Yes, I like print_r()) […]

8 | moos
July 31, 2009 at 8:22 am