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

Old question, but in PHP7 this is a catchable exception. Though I still think the class_exists($class) is a more explicit way to do it. However, you could do a try/catch block using the new \Throwable exception type:

$className = 'SmartForm' . $smartFormIdCode;
try {
    return new $className($smartFormIdCode);
} catch (\Throwable $ex) {
    return new SmartFormNull($smartformIdCode);
}