Error handling in PHP

Question

I\'m familiar with some of the basics, but what I would like to know more about is when and why error handling (including throwing exceptions) should be used in PHP, especia

Answer 1

Roughly speaking, errors are a legacy in PHP, while exceptions are the modern way to treat errors. The simplest thing then, is to set up an error-handler, that throws an exception. That way all errors are converted to exceptions, and then you can simply deal with one error-handling scheme. The following code will convert errors to exceptions for you:

function exceptions_error_handler($severity, $message, $filename, $lineno) {
  if (error_reporting() == 0) {
    return;
  }
  if (error_reporting() & $severity) {
    throw new ErrorException($message, 0, $severity, $filename, $lineno);
  }
}
set_error_handler('exceptions_error_handler');
error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_STRICT);

There are a few cases though, where code is specifically designed to work with errors. For example, the schemaValidate method of DomDocument raises warnings, when validating a document. If you convert errors to exceptions, it will stop validating after the first failure. Some times this is what you want, but when validating a document, you might actually want all failures. In this case, you can temporarily install an error-handler, that collects the errors. Here's a small snippet, I've used for that purpose:

class errorhandler_LoggingCaller {
  protected $errors = array();
  function call($callback, $arguments = array()) {
    set_error_handler(array($this, "onError"));
    $orig_error_reporting = error_reporting(E_ALL);
    try {
      $result = call_user_func_array($callback, $arguments);
    } catch (Exception $ex) {
      restore_error_handler();
      error_reporting($orig_error_reporting);
      throw $ex;
    }
    restore_error_handler();
    error_reporting($orig_error_reporting);
    return $result;
  }
  function onError($severity, $message, $file = null, $line = null) {
    $this->errors[] = $message;
  }
  function getErrors() {
    return $this->errors;
  }
  function hasErrors() {
    return count($this->errors) > 0;
  }
}

And a use case:

$doc = new DomDocument();
$doc->load($xml_filename);
$validation = new errorhandler_LoggingCaller();
$validation->call(
  array($doc, 'schemaValidate'),
  array($xsd_filename));
if ($validation->hasErrors()) {
  var_dump($validation->getErrors());
}