I've been toying around with XDebug this week, which allows me to debug php scripts interactively, by setting breakpoints, watching variables and stepping through the code from within Vim (it's a bit rudimentary, but it works). Marijn tipped me about this and I used his useful howto to set it up.

I'm still battling with python and vim to properly support spaces in filenames, I'll post my solution once I found it (I found it, see below). If you want to toy around with XDebug and Vim, you should definately check out this comment about other (non-space) special characters in urls.

Anyway, I started out this post because I made something pretty and wanted to share it. To use the XDebug extension, you need to pass XDEBUG_SESSION_START=id with the request you want to debug. Because I kept forgetting how this parameter was called exactly and because it is annoying to insert it at the end of some long url, especially when the url also uses # to jump to an anchor, I created a nifty bookmark.

var loc, tmp, anchor, url, args;

tmp = document.location.href.split('#');
if(tmp[1]) 
    anchor = "#" + tmp[1];
else 
    anchor = "";
tmp = tmp[0].split('?');
url = tmp[0];
if (tmp[1]) 
    args = "?" + tmp[1] + "&";
else 
    args = "?";
args += "XDEBUG_SESSION_START=id";
document.location.href = url + args + anchor;

This script splits the current location in url, args and anchors, adds the argument, and puts the location back together. Simple as that. You can create a bookmark from this script by right-clicking this link and pick "Bookmark this link..." or whatever your browser calls it. You can also use the link to test the script (watch the address bar).

I've tested this script on Firefox, but it should work on most browsers, for it doesn't do anything really complex.

Update: I've managed to convince the XDebug vim script to handle spaces in filenames properly. I've put up a fixed version and a diff with the fixes. Both include the above mentioned special characters fix.