Question

I’m wondering how one creates a debug room for their applications.

My example is that I output variable content to the screen for me to have a visual on what my variables are doing throughout the process. To make sure they are doing what they should be doing. (poor man’s tdd?)

——–NEW CODE——————–

So this is what I came up with for now but it involves a !!global variable!!

I have a common file that is included with all the pages of my script. In there I put the following:

<?php //COMMON FILE
$debug_mode = 'on'; //my trigger

if( strtolower($debug_mode) == 'on'){
    $debug = "<hr /><pre>";
    if( file_exists('debug_mode.php') ){  //This file will never be used in a
        include('debug_mode.php');    //a production environment
    }
}

function debug($str, &$debug){
    if( function_exists('debugff') ){
        $str = debugff($str, $debug);
    }
    else{
        unset($debug);
    }
}
?>

.

<?php //DEBUG_MODE FILE NEVER USED IN PRODUCTION MODE
if( strtolower($debug_mode) == 'on'){ 
    function debugff($debugstring, &$debug){ 

        global $debug;

        if( is_null($debugstring) ){
            echo $debug . "</pre><hr />";
        }
        else{ 
            $debug .= $debugstring . "\n";
        }
    }
}

?> 

To use the script I use a call to the debug function.

debug(“username:$user”, $debug);

And I can do that a million times. and when I want to print the results I simply call

debug(null, $debug);

I’ve heard countless number of times to never use a global variable and this is the first time I implement it. Granted the way I have it set up would mean that in the ‘real world’ the global variable will never get called, but how would I get the global variable out of here.

Answer 1

Try to learn a PHP framework. They solve these problems better and in an OOP way.

Anyway, in your example, you can remove a lot of the code:

$debug_mode = TRUE;

function dump() {
  global $debug_mode;

  if ($debug_mode) {
    call_user_func_array('var_dump', func_get_args());
  }
}

You can then dump your variables with dump($var1, $var2, $var3) and don’t worry about the production mode outside this function. The dumps will not be showed once you trigger the debug mode off.