Shortcut for echo "<pre>";print_r($myarray);echo "</pre>";

This is the shortest:

echo '<pre>',print_r($arr,1),'</pre>';

The closing tag can also be omitted.


Nope, you'd just have to create your own function:

function printr($data) {
   echo "<pre>";
      print_r($data);
   echo "</pre>";
}

Apparantly, in 2018, people are still coming back to this question. The above would not be my current answer. I'd say: teach your editor to do it for you. I have a whole bunch of debug shortcuts, but my most used is vardd which expands to: var_dump(__FILE__ . ':' . __LINE__, $VAR$);die();

You can configure this in PHPStorm as a live template.


You can set the second parameter of print_r to true to get the output returned rather than directly printed:

$output = print_r($myarray, true);

You can use this to fit everything into one echo (don’t forget htmlspecialchars if you want to print it into HTML):

echo "<pre>", htmlspecialchars(print_r($myarray, true)), "</pre>";

If you then put this into a custom function, it is just as easy as using print_r:

function printr($a) {
    echo "<pre>", htmlspecialchars(print_r($a, true)), "</pre>";
}

Tags:

Php