Recently I was using the SimpleXML extension from PHP5 to build a menu based on information contained in an XML file. I was using XPath queries to retrieve specific nodes from the XML tree and the var_dump() and print_r() functions to debug the results.

I thought my XPath queries were all wrong because the output data wasn’t the expected, all tree was returned instead. I tried many variations without success until I realized that something was wrong with the output. I let the debug functions aside and finished the code. And guess what? The code worked fine!

To confirm it I went to the manual to seek for any related information. No official note but I found an user comment about var_export not working as well!

So that’s it. Don’t use var_dump() nor print_r() to debug the content of SimpleXMLElement objects. Instead use print() or echo() on individual elements.

Update: I have also noticed a similar behavior with the DOM library.