I know (PHP’s) var_dump is supposed to be “human readable” and all, but analyzing large objects is just a pain in the neck. I am struggling to make sense of a few of the large objects that are being passed around in a script that we are running. (I know that using xdebug with and IDE is a good idea, but I have not been able to get xdebug to run on this project for some reason – several days lost, ugh).
Any ideas on how I can easily digest the contents of a really big var_dump? Any ideas are welcome… Although I am hoping that there is something similar to Thomas Frank’s JSON tool (where you just put some code in and it gives a nice graphical representation).
You could take a look at FirePHP. It enables you to write information to the firebug-console. If you write an array or object to the log and hover with your mouse over it, you get a nice presentation of the contents of that array. Here is a screenshot of a simple example.