Late to the game, but here's a really handy function that is super simple to use, allows you to pass as many arguments as you like, of any type, and will display the object contents in the browser console window as though you called console.log from JavaScript - but from PHP
Note, you can use tags as well by passing 'TAG-YourTag' and it will be applied until another tag is read, for example, 'TAG-YourNextTag'
/*
* Brief: Print to console.log() from PHP
* Description: Print as many strings,arrays, objects, and other data types to console.log from PHP.
* To use, just call consoleLog($data1, $data2, ... $dataN) and each dataI will be sent to console.log - note that
* you can pass as many data as you want an this will still work.
*
* This is very powerful as it shows the entire contents of objects and arrays that can be read inside of the browser console log.
*
* A tag can be set by passing a string that has the prefix TAG- as one of the arguments. Everytime a string with the TAG- prefix is
* detected, the tag is updated. This allows you to pass a tag that is applied to all data until it reaches another tag, which can then
* be applied to all data after it.
*
* Example:
* consoleLog('TAG-FirstTag',$data,$data2,'TAG-SecTag,$data3);
* Result:
* FirstTag '...data...'
* FirstTag '...data2...'
* SecTag '...data3...'
*/
function consoleLog(){
if(func_num_args() == 0){
return;
}
$tag = '';
for ($i = 0; $i < func_num_args(); $i++) {
$arg = func_get_arg($i);
if(!empty($arg)){
if(is_string($arg)&& strtolower(substr($arg,0,4)) === 'tag-'){
$tag = substr($arg,4);
}else{
$arg = json_encode($arg, JSON_HEX_TAG | JSON_HEX_AMP );
echo "<script>console.log('".$tag." ".$arg."');</script>";
}
}
}
}
NOTE: func_num_args() and func_num_args() are php functions for reading a dynamic number of input args, and allow this function to have infinitely many console.log requests from one function call