Why doesn't PHP catch a “Class not found” error?

Question

In the following example, if the class does not exist, I want to catch the error and create a Null class instead.

But in spite of my try/catch statement

Answer 1

Because it's a fatal error. Use class_exists() function to check if class exist.

Also: PHP is not Java - unless you redefined default error handler, it will raise errors and not throw exceptions.