[VarDumper] feat: function jd() to dump variables without html tags in json api call

[pierresh]

Q	A
Branch?	7.2
Bug fix?	no
New feature?	yes
Deprecations?	no
Issues	Refs #49754
License	MIT

dd() is really useful in the browser. However, when testing my endpoints with Behat in command line, the HTML tags generated by dd() make the result unreadable. To address this issue, I introduced the function jd() to simply dump the variables without generating HTML tags. This approach is more convenient than replacing dd() with var_dump() + die() + status 500.

Please see the example below:

currently, when dd(1,2,3);

And with jd(1,2,3);

[carsonbot]

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[alexandre-daubois]

Why calling this function jd()? I assume it stands for "JSON dump", however, looking at the code, there's no mention about JSON.

I think you may instead set a new VarDumper handler in your tests context. This will allow you to use the CliDumper rather than HtmlDumper. You will have less noise in your output. You can have an example here: https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/var_dumper.html#advanced-usage. You may do this in a Behat step executed before each scenario or feature.

Alternatively, you can set the VAR_DUMPER_FORMAT env var to cli in your test env to achieve this.

[pierresh]

Indeed, I called jd() for JSON. It might be wiser to rename it vd() or vdd() for var_dump() and die();

Yes, I could add some setup to my Behat tests for this, but I found that other people had the same needs as me in the issue 49754. So I believe it could be useful to have such a function for "off-road" debugging :).

[Jimbolino]

VAR_DUMPER_FORMAT=cli just writes to php://stdout, this is not useful when debugging api calls :)

There should be a "PlainTextDumper", and i would advocate that that would be the default,
unless there is a Accept: text/html header present, then HtmlDumper should be called.