Someone said this in #drupal today. I long wanted to blog about this. I never use print_r. There is no need for it, var_export is far superior IMO -- if I need to write a quick script which actually does something on the data, I can copypaste the output into PHP code. Little but annoying things like escaping apostrophes are handled too, so it's even useful for dumping strings. Of course, var_dump is also useful as that dumps type info -- how cool it would be if it would do that in a PHP comment and then it would also render valid PHP code as debug output.