Is there any way to debug PHP via browser console?

Question

Is there any way to debug PHP via browser console?

I sometimes want to debug a value on the system in production, but I wouldn’t want the user to notice. Then I got the idea to use the browser console.

It’s possible to do something like this:

console_log(['nome' => 'Wallace']);

And on the console appear:

{nome: "wallace"}

Answer 1

I even asked the question and answered, because I’ve never seen anyone with such curiosity.

There is a way, and I created it in this gist

The code is very simple. It is possible to pass infinite parameters to be debugged with this function.

Source Code:

function console_log()
{
    foreach (func_get_args() as $mixed) {
        printf('<script>console.log(%s)</script>', json_encode($mixed));
    }
}

The use of it would be like this:

console_log($_GET, $_POST, $_SERVER);

Then just open the console and see what happens ;)

Answer 2

A different way where it would not be possible to insert in the console (in case any error occurs after the call of the function you created) but debugging externally would be to write the result of the variable in an external file in this way:

ob_start();
var_dump($featuresArray);
$result = ob_get_clean();
$file = 'C:\PRINT_VAR_DUMP.txt';
file_put_contents($file, $result);

The contents saved in this file can be opened in Notepad++ (idented).