If you are working with CakePHP and haven’t checked it out yet, it’s very well worth looking through basics.php in the API docs.
As well as adding some PHP 5 functionality on PHP 4 servers, the script also adds a fair number of utility functions to the global namespace, such as:
// similar to print_r(), but dumps to the view and // is disabled if debug isn't > 0 in config.php pr($anything); // returns the correctly internationalised plural or // singular depending on locale. __n($singular, $plural, $count, $return);