Fatal error: Nesting level too deep - recursive dependency?

Hi,

Just wanted to mention that the above mentioned error may happen when dumping certain cached objects. The problem is that the contents of the cached object may have a variable that references itself, and then it causes a nested reference that breaks PHP. It seems this is a PHP limitation:

PHP Bug report: 30471
There is no way to return a correct output in this case, so this is not a bug but expected behavior.

For example, this happens when looking at object 'views_default_views:xx' in cache_views table.

Now, what?

The problem is not only related to var_export, but AFAICT it also happens with var_dump, print_r, etc. So it is not as easy as using a different PHP function to dump the contents of a variable.

The only way I can think of would be to do the same job in the module, using PHP code and cheching self references ourselves. While this is probably doable... does anyone know of an alternative or someone else that has resolved this?