Is there an equivalent of var_dump for methods in PHP?

Question

I'm working on some legacy code and I need to get some information from an object. The price, for example. The price could be stored in a variable or it could be retrieved via a method. I don't yet know, only that it exists within the object.

I can grab an object in the code and var_dump all of the variables to have a look-see at what's available at that point in the runtime. But sometimes what I need isn't returned by

$item->price

but instead needs to be retrieved by

$item->get_price()

It seems to me it would be really helpful to be able to dump information from methods in the same way as I can dump information from variables.

So ideally I'd stick this command in the code, and it would return minimally a list of all methods that can be called on the object. Ideally, if those methods have no inputs, then it would also return their return values too.

Does such a command exist in PHP? In any language?

Answer 1

You need to write your own.

Take a look at get_class_methods. You need to have the class name for this. You can obtain this by get_class.

So you want to introduce something like this in your library:

function getObjectMethods(object $obj) {
    $className = get_class($obj);
    return get_class_methods($className);
}

Maybe you should think about a better IDE, which supports type hinting etc. Take a look at PHPStorm for example.