Surprisingly, no one has described one of the best uses of this: dumping a variable and showing the location. When debugging, especially a big and unfamiliar system, it's a pain remembering where I added those var dumps. Also, this way there is a separator between multiple dump calls.
<?php
function dump( $var ) {
$result = var_export( $var, true );
$loc = whereCalled();
return "\n<pre>Dump: $loc\n$result</pre>";
}
function whereCalled( $level = 1 ) {
$trace = debug_backtrace();
$file = $trace[$level]['file'];
$line = $trace[$level]['line'];
$object = $trace[$level]['object'];
if (is_object($object)) { $object = get_class($object); }
return "Where called: line $line of $object \n(in $file)";
}
?>
In addition, calling 'whereCalled()' from any function will quickly identify locations that are doing something unexpected (e.g., updating a property at the wrong time). I'm new to PHP, but have used the equivalent in Perl for years.
