Question

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PHP ToString() equivalent
How to convert a PHP object to a string?

I’m looking for a function that can take any kind of variable (primitive, object, array, …) and convert it to a string, for debugging purposes.

This is the best question I could find about converting objects to strings. Its answers don’t seem to contain a general purpose solution that can handles all kinds of objects. I’ve tried (string)x, strval(x) and serialize(x), and also json_encode(x) from this answer.

(string)x and strval(x) cause Object of class Foo could not be converted to string. json_encode(x) returns an empty string for me. serialize() does work, but its output is not only textual (it contains weird “NULLs” and is a bit hard to read.

I tried search Stack Overflow for Object of class Foo could not be converted to string, but found a ton of specific question that got zero upvotes and no general solutions.

The question, again – how to pretty print / convert any php value into a string in php?

Answer 1

I usually go for print_r, works great for me so far.

PHP manual: http://php.net/manual/en/function.print-r.php

print_r — Prints human-readable information about a variable