Examples

Ladybug allows dumpling any variable, including arrays, objects and resources. Just provide a variable and Ladybug will take care of the rest:

Simple variables

<?php
$var1 = NULL;
$var2 = 15;
$var3 = 15.5;
$var4 = 'hello world!';
$var5 = false;

ladybug_dump($var1, $var2, $var3, $var4, $var5);

As a result:

Arrays

<?php
$var = array(
    array(
        'name' => 'Raul',
        'age' => 29
    ),
    array(
        'name' => 'John',
        'age' => 27
    )
);

ladybug_dump($var)

Objects

<?php
$var = new Foo();
ladybug_dump($var)

Resources

<?php
$fh = fopen('test.txt', 'r');
ladybug_dump($fh)

Other formats

Ladybug is able to detect being used (e.g. browser, CLI or an ajax request) and chooses the right format:

• Browser -> Html
• CLI -> Console
• Ajax -> Text

CLI (Command-line interface)

$ php examples/array.php

Text

array(2)
    [0]: array(2)
        [name]: string(4) "Raul"
        [age]: int 29
    [1]: array(2)
        [name]: string(4) "John"
        [age]: int 27

Serializable

Variable dumps can be exported to some other formats, like XML, JSON or YAML, but for this, Ladybug needs other packages to do the job: jms/serializer(for XML and JSON) andsymfony/yaml` (for YAML):

<?php
$var = 1;

$dumper = new \Ladybug\Dumper();
$dumper->setFormat('json');
$json = $dumper->dump($var);

Extended objects/resources

Ladybug allows extending any object or resource to display richer information. For example, the ladybug-plugin-extra package provides built-in inspectors for MySQL resultsets or GD images:

<?php
    $connection = mysql_connect('localhost', 'dbuser', 'dbpassword');
    mysql_select_db('dbname', $connection);
    $result = mysql_query('SELECT * FROM user', $connection);

    ladybug_dump($result);

<?php
    $img = imagecreatefrompng(__DIR__ . '/images/ladybug.png');
    ladybug_dump($img);

New inspectors can be added easily, see the extending section for more info.

Object metadata

Ladybug also detects automatically some classes to display an icon and a link to the documentation. For example, provides built-in support for PHP objects and Symfony2 classes:

More examples

There are lots of examples in the /examples directory.

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Next section: Usage.