mindplay/readable

A few simple functions to format any kind of PHP value or type as human-readable.

Mainly, this is intended to help you produce better error-messages:

if (!is_int($value)) {
    throw new UnexpectedValueException("expected integer, got: " . readable::typeof($value));
} else if ($value > 100) {
    throw new RangeException("expected value up to 100, got: " . readable::value($value));
}

Note that this library is not "better var_dump" - it won't color-code things or dump deep object graphs. There are plenty of other libraries for that sort of thing.

Presently, this library consists of these simple functions:

• readable::value($value) formats any single PHP value as human-readable.
• readable::values($array) formats an array of (mixed) values as human-readable.
• readable::typeof($value) returns the type of value (or class name) for any given value.
• readable::callback($callable) formats any callable as human-readable.
• readable::severity($int) returns for example E_WARNING as human-readable "Warning".
• readable::error($exception) returns a human-readable Exception/Error summary.
• readable::trace($trace) formats a stack-trace with file-names, line-numbers, function-names and (optionally) arguments.

The latter function callback() will fall back to regular value() formatting if the given value is not a callable - this function is preferable when a given value was expected to be callable, e.g. recognizes function-names as strings and objects implementing __invoke().

See the source code and test suite for all formatting features.