What is the JavaScript equivalent of var_dump or print_r in PHP?

Most modern browsers have a console in their developer tools, useful for this sort of debugging.

console.log(myvar);

Then you will get a nicely mapped out interface of the object/whatever in the console.

Check out the console documentation for more details.

Firebug.

Then, in your javascript:

var blah = {something: 'hi', another: 'noway'};
console.debug("Here is blah: %o", blah);

Now you can look at the console, click on the statement and see what is inside blah

I put this forward to help anyone needing something readily practical for giving you a nice, prettified (indented) picture of a JS Node. None of the other solutions worked for me for a Node ("cyclical error" or whatever...). This walks you through the tree under the DOM Node (without using recursion) and gives you the depth, tagName (if applicable) and textContent (if applicable).

Any other details from the nodes you encounter as you walk the tree under the head node can be added as per your interest...

function printRNode( node ){
    // make sort of human-readable picture of the node... a bit like PHP print_r

    if( node === undefined || node === null ){
        throwError( 'node was ' + typeof node );
    }
    let s = '';

    // NB walkDOM could be made into a utility function which you could 
    // call with one or more callback functions as parameters...

    function walkDOM( headNode ){
      const stack = [ headNode ];
      const depthCountDowns = [ 1 ];
      while (stack.length > 0) {
        const node = stack.pop();
        const depth = depthCountDowns.length - 1;
        // TODO non-text, non-BR nodes could show more details (attributes, properties, etc.)
        const stringRep = node.nodeType === 3? 'TEXT: |' + node.nodeValue + '|' : 'tag: ' + node.tagName;
        s += '  '.repeat( depth ) + stringRep + '\n';
        const lastIndex = depthCountDowns.length - 1;
        depthCountDowns[ lastIndex ] = depthCountDowns[ lastIndex ] - 1;
        if( node.childNodes.length ){
            depthCountDowns.push( node.childNodes.length );
            stack.push( ... Array.from( node.childNodes ).reverse() );
        }
        while( depthCountDowns[ depthCountDowns.length - 1 ] === 0 ){
            depthCountDowns.splice( -1 );
        }
      }
    } 
    walkDOM( node );
    return s;
}