How to properly debug PHP scripts: from var_dump to Xdebug

Hello everyone! I'm a PHP beginner and have been struggling with debugging code for the second week now. The problem is that I don't understand how to effectively find errors. Currently, I do this: I insert echo and var_dump everywhere to see what's happening in the variables. But this is very inconvenient — the code gets cluttered, and if there's an error in a loop or nested condition, I spend hours moving these echo statements around. Here's an example of my code that doesn't work as expected: ```php