Sometimes, you have to work with…let’s call it “legacy code”. You don’t get to use the nice things to help you debug your code, like Laravel’s dd(), and you’re getting really tired of var_dump-ing all over your web page just to figure out what variables are being used by the particular function you’re debugging.
In cases like that, here’s a hacky way to print data to the javascript console:
echo "<script>console.log(" . json_encode($whatever) . ");</script>";
This does exactly what it looks like: prints a script tag which console.log’s a json-encoded PHP variable of your choice to the inspector console. You can do this with practically any type of variable, but where this is particularly useful is when dealing with arrays and objects. Instead of having to burn your eyes looking through lines and lines of irrelevant data to find what you’re looking for, you can just take advantage of your browser’s object display syntax and only look at the parts which are relevant to you.
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