Alternative var_dump for PHP that allows limiting depth of nested arrays

Question

I try to use var_dump on command line with phpsh in order to get debugging information about some variable. But the variable contains a very deeply nested data structure. Therefore, using the default var_dump outputs too much information.

I want to limit the depth level of var_dump output. I found that XDebug's var_dump implementation allows depth limiting as described here: http://www.giorgiosironi.com/2009/07/how-to-stop-getting-megabytes-of-text.html

Unfortunately, I couldn't make this work neither. I don't know yet the reason for this. I am looking for if there are any alternative var_dump implementations to try.

Answer 1

json_encode takes a depth argument. Do this:

echo '<pre>' . json_encode($your_array, JSON_PRETTY_PRINT, $depth) . '</pre>';