How to save var_dump() result to a string in PHP?

Hello everyone! I'm a beginner PHP developer and I have a problem. I often use var_dump() for debugging to view the contents of variables, arrays, or objects. But there's one annoyance: var_dump() outputs the result directly to the browser (or console).

I need to save this output to a string variable, for example, to write it to a log file or send it via email for error analysis in production. Simply assigning the result of var_dump() to a variable doesn't work — the function returns void (returns nothing) and outputs data directly.

Here's an example of code that doesn't work as I need:

<?php\n$data = ['name' => 'Ivan', 'age' => 30, 'skills' => ['PHP', 'JavaScrip