Question

I often have the need to view data in arrays and use the html tag <pre> to do this. However, it becomes tedious and frustrating having to type the same thing out all the time.

My question, what is your technique for avoiding this annoyance of programming with PHP?

Answer 1

Funny you should ask that, I just wrote a short function to save me the pain of having to do this so much.

function pre($option = "open"){                   
  if (is_object($option) || is_array($option)):
    print "<pre>";
    print_r($option);
    print "</pre>";
  else:
    $option=="open"?print "<pre>": print "</pre>";
  endif;
}    

If you pass an array or an object to it, it will print it inside pre tags. If you just want an opening tag, then do not pass an argument. If you want a closing tag, pass it any other argument (e.g. 1)

e.g.:

pre($result); //prints in pre tags

pre(); //just prints <pre>
print "hello";
pre(1); //just prints </pre>