Problem

In Symfony this need is very common: "given an arbitrary variable, return its best possible representation as a string".

Today we solve this problem at least in 6 different ways across different bundles and components:

• ValueExporter class (in Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\DataCollector\Util) used mostly in DataCollectors.
• sanitizeContext() method in LoggerDataCollector (Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\DataCollector)
• getStringRepresentation() method in DebugAccessDecisionManager class.
• getListenerInfo() in TraceableEventDispatcher
• formatValue(), formatParameter and formatCallable in FrameworkBundle's Console descriptors.
• formatValue() method in OptionsResolver component.
• varToString() method in FileLoaderLoadException class (Symfony/Component/Config/Exception)

We "can't" use VarDumper because we need a pure value exporter which doesn't add CSS/JS code or other advanced stuff.

Solution

Improve VarDumper to export variables in the simplest way possible so we can replace the existing code and get the exact same results.