Debugging PHP
PHP Manual

Debugger Protocol

The PHP 3 debugger protocol is line-based. Each line has a type, and several lines compose a message. Each message starts with a line of the type start and terminates with a line of the type end. PHP 3 may send lines for different messages simultaneously.

A line has this format:

date time host(pid) type: message-data

date
Date in ISO 8601 format (yyyy-mm-dd)
time
Time including microseconds: hh:mm:uuuuuu
host
DNS name or IP address of the host where the script error was generated.
pid
PID (process id) on host of the process with the PHP 3 script that generated this error.
type

Type of line. Tells the receiving program about what it should treat the following data as:

Debugger Line Types
Name Meaning
start Tells the receiving program that a debugger message starts here. The contents of data will be the type of error message, listed below.
message The PHP 3 error message.
location File name and line number where the error occurred. The first location line will always contain the top-level location. data will contain file:line. There will always be a location line after message and after every function.
frames Number of frames in the following stack dump. If there are four frames, expect information about four levels of called functions. If no "frames" line is given, the depth should be assumed to be 0 (the error occurred at top-level).
function Name of function where the error occurred. Will be repeated once for every level in the function call stack.
end Tells the receiving program that a debugger message ends here.

data
Line data.
Debugger Error Types
Debugger PHP 3 Internal
warning E_WARNING
error E_ERROR
parse E_PARSE
notice E_NOTICE
core-error E_CORE_ERROR
core-warning E_CORE_WARNING
unknown (any other)

Example#1 Example Debugger Message

1998-04-05 23:27:400966 lucifer.guardian.no(20481) start: notice 1998-04-05 23:27:400966 lucifer.guardian.no(20481) message: Uninitialized variable 1998-04-05 23:27:400966 lucifer.guardian.no(20481) location: (null):7 1998-04-05 23:27:400966 lucifer.guardian.no(20481) frames: 1 1998-04-05 23:27:400966 lucifer.guardian.no(20481) function: display 1998-04-05 23:27:400966 lucifer.guardian.no(20481) location: /home/ssb/public_html/test.php3:10 1998-04-05 23:27:400966 lucifer.guardian.no(20481) end: notice


Debugging PHP
PHP Manual