If you have doing PHP development for any length of time, then you have ran across the need to perform PHP debugging without the use of a full-blown debugger. In many cases, print_r works fine. However, echoing debugging text to the page will often break the layout. A method was needed that would output text while also not breaking the layout.

To satisfy this constraint PhpPopupDebug was written. Actually, parts of this code was found elsewhere a very long time ago. The original source is no longer known. As it was used, changes to the code were made to make it easier to use and more robust. When a variable is dumped to the output, a JavaScript window is opened in the background with the dumped data. Therefore, no text is visible on the page.