How often do you write print_r( $something ) to see what’s in the variable? This works great, except it appears inline right where your code is executing.

My ea_pp() function works the same way, but outputs it in a console-like box attached to the right side of the screen. This pretty printing function was originally built by Chris Bratlien.

Example

I was looking to see which attributes are included in the core/gallery block, so I added the following code to functions.php:

add_action( 'wp_footer', function() {
	global $post;
	$blocks = parse_blocks( $post->post_content );
	foreach( $blocks as $block ) {
		if( 'core/gallery' === $block['blockName'] ) {
			ea_pp( $block );
		}
	}
});

This displayed all the gallery block information on the right side of the screen:

Code

I include this in a mu-plugin locally so it only runs in my development environment, but you could also add it to a plugin or your theme’s functions.php file.

/**
 * Pretty Printing
 */
function ea_pp( $obj, $label="" ) {
	$data = json_encode( print_r( $obj,true ) );
	?>