Make var_dump look pretty

Question

I really love var_export(). If you like copy/paste-able code, try:

echo '<pre>' . var_export($data, true) . '</pre>';

Or even something like this for color syntax highlighting:

highlight_string("<?php\n\$data =\n" . var_export($data, true) . ";\n?>");

You can do the same with print_r(). For var_dump() you would just need to add the <pre> tags:

echo '<pre>';
var_dump($data);
echo '</pre>';

Try xdebug extension for php.

Example:

<?php var_dump($_SERVER); ?>

Outputs:

Use preformatted HTML element

    echo '<pre>';
        var_dump($data);
    echo '</pre>';

I have make an addition to @AbraCadaver answers. I have included a javascript script which will delete php starting and closing tag. We will have clean more pretty dump.

May be somebody like this too.

function dd($data){
  highlight_string("<?php\n " . var_export($data, true) . "?>");
  echo '<script>document.getElementsByTagName("code")[0].getElementsByTagName("span")[1].remove() ;document.getElementsByTagName("code")[0].getElementsByTagName("span")[document.getElementsByTagName("code")[0].getElementsByTagName("span").length - 1].remove() ; </script>';
  die();
}

Result before:

Result After:

Now we don't have php starting and closing tag

I don't seem to have enough rep to close this as a duplicate, but it is one if someone else can do that. I posted the same thing over at A more pretty/informative Var_dump alternative in PHP? but for the sake of saving time, I'll copy/paste it here too:

I had to add another answer here because I didn't really want to go through the steps in the other solutions. It is extremely simple and requires no extensions, includes etc and is what I prefer. It's very easy and very fast.

First just json_encode the variable in question:

echo json_encode($theResult);

Copy the result you get into the JSON Editor at http://jsoneditoronline.org/ just copy it into the left side pane, click Copy > and it pretty prints the JSON in a really nice tree format.

To each their own, but hopefully this helps some others have one more nice option! :)