Today I stumbled upon an old problem while using var_export() on an array with objects. var_exports()'s description is " Outputs or returns a parsable string representation of a variable ", but it didn't work to well in this case:

array (
  0 =>
  class ezcTranslationData {
    public $original = 'Node ID:';
    public $translation = 'Knoop ID:';
    public $comment = false;
    public $status = 0;
  },
);

This snippet above can of course not be parsed as valid PHP code. After thinking about it for a bit, I came up with a solution. Instead of the code above, we now generate:

array (
  0 =>
  ezcTranslationData::__set_state(array(
    'original' => 'Node ID:',
    'translation' => 'Knoop ID:',
    'comment' => false,
    'status' => 0,
  )),
);

The __set_state() method is then required to be implemented by the class for this to work, but that is better than generating code which can never be parsed. The name comes from the Memento pattern . As this fixes a bug this made it into PHP 5.1.0 and PHP 6.0.0.