ser-pretty

ser-pretty prints serialized PHP in the style of var_dump() without sourcing the required classes.

$ src/bin/ser-pretty test.txt 
  class stdClass (1) {
    private $bar =>
    int(223)
  }

Download ser-pretty as a PHAR or require qafoo/ser-pretty via composer.

But, why?

It happens often that you have serialized PHP data lying around, e.g. from caching, session data or transmitting it through a queue. If you want to inspect this data for debugging purposes you typically write a tiny script that loads your classes (which are needed for de-serialization), get the data and display a var dump.

ser-pretty deprecates the script-step by simply rendering a var_dump() outut from serialized data, without needing to source the class source.

The CLI

ser-pretty comes with a very simple PHP CLI script, that reads serialized data from STDIN or a given file and prints the formatted output to STDOUT. Just call:

$ ser-pretty.phar dumped_data.txt

This even works for Doctrine annotation cache files since ser-pretty 0.2.0.

You can also pipe serialized data from another script to it:

$ some_script.php | ser-pretty.phar

The Lib

You can also use ser-pretty as a library to integrate pretty printing of serialized PHP data into your debugging/monitoring/… tools. Just look into the CLI script to see what it does.

• The Parser parses serialized into a very simple AST
• A Writer turns an AST into a string representation

ser-pretty ships with a var_dump() style writer, the SimpleTextWriter which you can use out of the box. You can implement your own writer by deriving the Writer class.

Installation

Just include ser-pretty in your project via composer using or download the latest PHAR.