inspect Debug Helper

There will be many times where you want to inspect the value of a variable or object. We will create two functions in our helpers.php file to help us do that.

inspect Function

/**
 * Inspect a value
 *
 * @param array $values
 * @return void
 */
function inspect($value)
{
  echo '<pre>';
  var_dump($value);
  echo '</pre>';
}

This will simply format and output whatever we pass in. We are not using die here so it won't stop the script. This way we can use it in a loop without it stopping the script after the first iteration. We can also use it multiple times in a script.

Let's say we were having an issue loading a view. We could use inspect to see what the $view variable is:

function loadView($name)
{
  $viewPath = basePath("views/{$name}.view.php");

  inspect($viewPath);

  // Make sure path exists
  if (file_exists($viewPath)) {
    require $viewPath;
  } else {
    echo "View '{$name}' not found.";
  }
}

Now it will output the value of $viewPath:

string(57) "/Users/bradtraversy/Sites/workopiadev/views/home.view.php"

inspectAndDie Function

There will also be times where we want to dump a value and stop everything after it's called. We can create a function called inspectAndDie to do this:

/**
 * Inspect a value and die
 *
 * @param mixed $value
 * @return void
 */
function inspectAndDie($value)
{
  echo '<pre>';
  die(var_dump($value));
  echo '</pre>';
}

Now we can use it in our code:

function loadView($name)
{
  $viewPath = basePath("views/{$name}.view.php");

  inspectAndDie($viewPath);

  // Make sure path exists
  if (file_exists($viewPath)) {
    require $viewPath;
  } else {
    echo "View '{$name}' not found.";
  }
}

Now all you will see is the output and nothing else. This is useful for debugging and seeing what a variable is without having to do a bunch of var_dump and die statements.