Re: PHP newbie: I love it, but...

Jean wrote: > PHP is a very nice language. Been about a week reading O'Reilly & writing > my first program. Making some fast progress. But, as I embellish my > program, I am beginning to run into trouble. I am finding PHP to be > extremely difficult to debug. There's a limit to embedding echo to check > the program flow. Then, there are times when the browser shows absolutely > nothing. Browser's Show Source Code lists next to nothing; I assume this is > because the interpreter hung on a missing brace or something and outputted > nothing! Until I become good at spotting my errors, I've got to find a > debugging tool. Any words of wisdom would be appreciated. I frequently find that http://php.net/errorlog works very well when I don't want to use echo. Also be sure you use things like: if (1){ echo "Debug message<BR>\n"; } and then change the 1 to 0 to get rid of your messages. And then back to 1 when you figure out you didn't really fix the bug. Another option would be to get a decent editor that color-codes your source. Actually most any programmer's editor will do it with the right plug-in. There's a web-site in the UK somewhere listing all the PHP editors/debuggers with editorial comments... For hard-core debugging, you could try Zend Debugger ($$$) Komodo ($$$) PHP Edit (?) or, err, that other PHP debugger I always forget about... I've never really gotten into any of them heavily, since echo/errorlog work just fine for me. But I guess I cut my teeth back when debuggers didn't really exist, so maybe I'm just an old fart.