DD('Strength and Honour')

Sometimes I do what I want to do. The rest of the time, I do what I have to.

Tommy Flanagan, as Cicero, said that in the film Gladiator.

I agree with Cicero, I'd probably go a bit further and say "Most of the time, I do what I have to, but every now and then I do what I want to do". For instance, what I have to do, most of the time, is use WordPress; a ready made platform or system; Laravel; or whatever. Usually because that thing does what's needed and there's no point starting from scratch.

But it's good to make stuff just for the fun of it, be that a 221B Baker Street database, your own uri shortener or whatever takes your fancy. And when I do that there are certain functions that are available from the get go.

A while ago, inspired by the Laravel DD Helper Function, I created a dd function of my own. It's rather basic, but from a project starting point it's really useful.

<?php 
function dd(...$args) {
    $style = 'background:#111111;color:#ffff99;padding:5px';
    $backtrace = debug_backtrace(DEBUG_BACKTRACE_IGNORE_ARGS, 1)[0];
    $file = $backtrace['file'] ?? 'Unknown file';
    $line = $backtrace['line'] ?? 'Unknown line';

    echo '<pre style="' . htmlspecialchars($style, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8') . '">';
    echo "This came from $file on line $line";
    foreach ($args as $arg) {
        echo htmlspecialchars(print_r($arg, true), ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
    }
    echo '</pre>';
    die();
}

It's pretty straight forward.

It starts by taking $args in something called a "Variadic Paremter" (yeah - I looked it up) which means instead of defining a specific number of arguments, I can play with as many as I want for the dump. So it could run through $var_1, $var_2, $var_3 and so on. It turns them into an array, which the function then handles later on in a loop. Truth is, I usually only use it for the one variable, but it's handy to be able to cope with more.

Then there's a little bit of styling so the dump looks nicer than standard <pre> text, this is probably the bit that changes most often as I go round and about trying to decide what looks best!

Then into debug_backtrace which generates a backtrace for whatever I'm wanting to dump, for this one I'm just getting the file location ($file) and the line ($line) that the dump is working on.

Once we've done the backtrace it's time to output stuff, escpaing a bit of html, using the style, and the foreach loop to handle the $args.

Oh yeah - then we die.

It's handy for pretty much any project I spin up myself (such as my website!). As I said, frameworks and starting points all run with their own version of this, most of them are far more robust. But this certainly gets me by.