I've recently had to get up to speed on a web application written in PHP. Using PHP, I didn't have the luxury of RubyMine's debugger, though I still needed to see what was going on at different breakpoints in the code. When possible, I pulled out little snippets into a .php page and was able to inspect them using this code: echo "

"; printr($varto_inspect); echo "

" The result is easily readable output similar to the <%= debug var %> option in a Rails .erb view. source

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1168175/is-there-a-pretty-print-for-php