function pr ($mixed)
{
	echo '<pre>' . htmlentities( utf8_encode( print_r( $mixed, true ) ), ENT_QUOTES, 'utf-8' ) . '</pre>' ;
}

When writing PHP, I often find that I need quick debug access to an Object or Array to see what it contains. PHP provides print_r, which works great–except that the data appears without all the tabbing in regular ol’ HTML. This is annoying for large Arrays or complex Objects.

That is why I created the pr() function. It basically just wraps the output of print_r in pre tags and then your formatting is back.

Depending on the encoding of the data you are passing to and getting from print_r, you may run across problems when combining print_r and htmlentities (with utf-8). If the encodings don’t match, it may return nothing at all! This could either mean that the variable is some kind of empty, or it could mean that htmlentities didn’t like the encoding that was returned by print_r, and crapped all over itself.

So, you first have to convert the data returned by print_r to utf8 (or whatever the encoding of your web page is) before passing it along to htmlentities. Since I try to keep every web page I work on in utf8, I keep this function set up to compliment that.

As long as you have a working utf8_encode, this function should always output pretty, utf-8 encoded data in HTML. If you need to convert to some other encoding beside utf8, you can use mb_convert_encoding.