stepping thru the code?

id10t

OK, its been forever since I've done anything with Visual Basic (hint - v. 4.0 was the last one I used...) , and now I'm missing one of the features of it. I'm hoping htere is a PHP IDE that will do the same...

I need to step thru some code and watch the values of some variables, etc. Is there any way to do this with PHP (I use Linux for my desktop, but will use windows in a vm if needed)?

Or am I going ot be stuck with sticking with my text editor (kwrite fwiw) and just echoing out a bunch of stuff while the script runs to keep an eye on things?

NogDog

I believe Zend Studio will let you do that. If you don't want to invest in that and if no one else has a suggestion for a free (or cheap) solution, you could use the [man]error_log/man function to output debug info, then open a shell window and do a [FONT="Courier New"]tail -f logfilename[/FONT] to watch what gets output as you run your script. (Or maybe a [FONT="Courier New"]tail -f logfilename | more[/FONT] if you're expecting a lot of data?)

id10t

Welp, $300 sorta blows it for me, unless I can get some sort of .edu discount...

Looks like I'll be echoing a lot of stuff, maybe checking for a debug value on the URL ...

jkurrle

Well, when I am debugging a huge PHP file, I do the following:

1) I set $DEBUG="YES" at the beginning of my php file
2) then, every place I need to echo data for tracing, instead of a simple echo, I put the following: if ($DEBUG=="YES") echo "Variable xyz is value $xyz <br />";
3) Once I'm done debugging, I simply set $DEBUG="NO" at the beginning of the file.

It works well, if you don't mind spending a few extra CPU cycles...