PHP error_log outputting line breaks as literal "\n" strings on Mac OSX

Question

I'm working on some code that uses error_log() for debugging. The problem is that for some reason, all of the line breaks in the output appear as literal \n strings, so there's no actual line break (making it damn near impossible to comprehend complex arrays).
I tried using both var_export and print_r with the error_log function, and both led to the same result: a block of text with \n scattered throughout. I even tried doing str_replace \n to PHP_EOL with no success. What am I doing wrong?

To clarify: the \n strings appear in the Console error log viewer, TextEdit, and the Terminal.

EDIT

Just wanted to note in advance that yes, I'm aware that you need to double-quote \n strings for them to appear as line breaks. However, I'm dealing with the output from print_r or var_export (to inspect an array) so this doesn't really help me (I think?).

Solution 1

Apparently, this issue is independent of your operating system. See this question: PHP error log and newline chars

...you should be able to change the error_log directive in your php.ini on Debian to point to a file. If this is undefined, it will go through syslog which doesn't support multiple lines.

Solution 2

As an alternative, you can process / replace the '\n' via sed, so they display like new lines in the console:

Linux

$ tail -f error_log | sed "s/\\\n/\\n/g"

Mac OS X

# WARNING - don't just copy+paste (see comment below)
$ tail -f error_log | sed "s/\\\n/^M^L/g"

Note: In Mac OS X, the end of a line is CRLF (Carriage Return Line Feed) when in LINUX system it's only LF (Line Feed)

Note 2: In Mac OS X to output ^M in the Terminal, press Control+V Control+M, to output ^L, press Control+V Control+L

Comments

[Chris Burgess]

Note also that for Apache to write newlines to error.log, it will need write permissions to do so (else syslog will end up writing to error.log instead). Perms fix or new file 'php-errors.log' if you want to preserve syslog format for Apache's errors (my preference).