When running a PHPUnit test, I would like to be able to dump output so I can debug one or two things.
I have tried the following (similar to the PHPUnit Manual example);
class theTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase { /** * @outputBuffering disabled */ public function testOutput() { print_r("Hello World"); print "Ping"; echo "Pong"; $out = "Foo"; var_dump($out); } }
With the following result:
PHPUnit @package_version@ by Sebastian Bergmann. . Time: 0 seconds, Memory: 3.00Mb OK (1 test, 0 assertions)
Notice there is none of the expected output.
I’m using the HEAD versions of the git repos as of September 19th, 2011.
Output of php -version
:
$ php -version PHP 5.2.9 (cli) (built: Dec 8 2010 11:36:37) Copyright (c) 1997-2009 The PHP Group Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2009 Zend Technologies with Xdebug v2.1.0, Copyright (c) 2002-2010, by Derick Rethans
Is there anything I’m doing wrong, or is this potentially a PHPUnit bug?
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Answer
UPDATE
Just realized another way to do this that works much better than the --verbose
command line option:
class TestSomething extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase { function testSomething() { $myDebugVar = array(1, 2, 3); fwrite(STDERR, print_r($myDebugVar, TRUE)); } }
This lets you dump anything to your console at any time without all the unwanted output that comes along with the --verbose
CLI option.
As other answers have noted, it’s best to test output using the built-in methods like:
$this->expectOutputString('foo');
However, sometimes it’s helpful to be naughty and see one-off/temporary debugging output from within your test cases. There is no need for the var_dump
hack/workaround, though. This can easily be accomplished by setting the --verbose
command line option when running your test suite. For example:
$ phpunit --verbose -c phpunit.xml
This will display output from inside your test methods when running in the CLI environment.