Question

I’ve got a PHP class which extends ArrayIterator, and has all the necessary methods implemented so that it behaves like an array.

This works fine for things like foreach loops, but calling print_r on it still prints out the object’s variables, rather than printing it as it would an array.

Is there some way of overriding this behaviour so that calling print_r (and I guess var_dump) will print custom output for this object?

Answer 1

No, because it is designed to give information about the variable (i.e. it is used for debugging) and not just to give some string representation of it.

You can overwrite __toString though and use echo.