Is there a way to get the name of a variable? PHP - Reflection

Question

I know this is not exactly reflection, but kind of. I want to make a debug function that gets a variable and prints a var_dump and the variable name.

Of course, when

Answer 1

I know this is very very late, but i did it in a different way.

It might honestly be a bit bad for performance, but since it's for debugging it shouldn't be a problem.

I read the file where the function is called, on the line it was called and I cut out the variable name.

function dump($str){
    // Get the caller with debug backtrace
    $bt = debug_backtrace();
    $caller = array_shift($bt);

    // Put the file where the function was called in an array, split by lines
    $readFileStr = file($caller['file']);

    // Read the specific line where the function was called
    $lineStr = $readFileStr[$caller['line'] -1];

    // Get the variable name (including $) by taking the string between '(' and ')'
    $regularOutput = preg_match('/\((.*?)\)/', $lineStr, $output);
    $variableName = $output[1];

    // echo the var name and in which file and line it was called
    echo "var: " . $variableName . " dumped in file: " . $caller['file'] . ' on line: ' . $caller['line'] . '
';

    // dump the given variable
    echo '
' . var_export($str, true) . '
';
}