I know this is a super old post, but I figured this may still be helpful.

If you’re comfortable with reading json format you could replace your var_dump with:

return json_encode($myvar);

I’ve been using this to help troubleshoot a service I’ve been building that has some deeply nested arrays. This will return every level of your array without truncating anything or requiring you to change your php.ini file.

Also, because the json_encoded data is a string it means you can write it to the error log easily

error_log(json_encode($myvar));

It probably isn’t the best choice for every situation, but it’s a choice!