I’ve been developing with PHP for over a decade and I just love it when I learn a new trick.
Perhaps you are working on a command line script and want some feedback, but you’re output buffering to generate a fancy report (or something). You can bypass the output buffering with this little trick
<?php ob_start(); echo "BOOM!\n"; fwrite( STDOUT, "You smell funky\n" ); echo ob_get_clean();
You smell funky BOOM!