When trying to work out what the hell is going wrong in your PHP application the first thing most of us start doing is madly start var_dump()'ing everything possible to work out where the problem is. var_dump() is fine, but by default it comes out in one line. So then we need to echo <pre> tags. Then we can't always see whats going on, especially if the background is black and bla bla bla so it goes on.

He mentions an alternative like XDebug, but that also requires access to install it on the server. His alternative, the "dump" function, catches the error, pulls out a backtrace of the path your script took to get there and echoes it out with the line number of the error and filename.

However, because we as PHP developers are lazy, provide a few GDB tricks to make this easier. First of all, it's only really going to work if you haven't stripped the symbols from your PHP and Apache binaries. Secondly, you still need to have the PHP source lying around somewhere.

He suggests using GDB to run the backtraces and create a file to help you track down the infinite recursion problem that could be giving you issues.

How to get a back trace on windows without having to compile PHP has been an impossible task for many of us. The difficulty was to first succeed to compile php (given that you have a visual C++ installed). If you are in the middle of a bug hunting session, no need to say that setting up a windows build system is the last thing you like, especially if it is your first time. Thanks to Edin's window binary and MS Diagnostic Debug , it is now possible to have a backtrace in a couple of clicks.

To use the method you will need a few pieces of software to help out but all are available for free. Next up are the steps to get things set up (simple) and the creation of the backtrace to catch the error, complete with screenshots for the whole way. The end result is a nice, pretty error message output to the browser (Internet Explorer) that also dumps the backtrace for you to use.

This function generates a backtrace from the function it's inside, making it easy to tracke backwards the path that the data's taking to get to that location. Very handy for tracking down which functionality it is that's causing the issues...