Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

Gotta love the PHP

Quick - what does this line of PHP do:

Look, its an 'at sign'. Hmm...that must be something special. I bet its some really advanced crazy PHP feat...oh of course - its PHP's error control! it tells the intrepeter to ignore any and all errors in that line of code! This warning from the docs is cool:

Currently the "@" error-control operator prefix will even disable error reporting for critical errors that will terminate script execution. Among other things, this means that if you use "@" to suppress errors from a certain function and either it isn't available or has been mistyped, the script will die right there with no indication as to why.

Thank you PHP language designers, for creating such readable, obvious code. Between the @ operator and the awesome function names, I don't know what I love more about php.

ampersand => &
at => @

Quick fix before the PHP fanboys show! LoL

Good find - fixed. Thanks.

And before anyone says it, I just haven’t had time to migrate off of wordpress. Trust me, I would love to.

Php is still twenty zillions (approximately) times more readable than perl. And I like the way I’m always discovering new functions and even more obscure ways to use them. Today’s adventure is array_map!

I recommend to use E_STRICT for PHP and avoid to use this ‘at sign’ (or should I say abuse?).

Supressing errors can set you to some hours debugging since finding the error is a horror.

- Unomi -

Why does something like this even exist? Isn’t ignoring an error (as opposed to catching an exception) considered a really Bad Thing? Man, I really don’t miss PHP one bit.