Error Suppression
| Some of the errors you're likely to encounter aren't completely preventable. Consider, for example, the following piece of code: $webpage = file_get_contents('http://www.example.com'); Under ordinary circumstances, $webpage will be populated with the HTML content of the page located at http://www.example.com; however, it's entirely possible that www.example.com is down or otherwise inaccessible. In such a case, PHP will raise an E_WARNING error and set the value of $webpage to FALSE. Warning: file_get_contents(http://www.example.com): failed to open stream: Connection refused in /home/jdoe/public_html/fetchPage.php on line 1 On a production site, you most certainly would want to show your users a more friendly "Come back later" type message. We can prevent PHP from displaying this error message in any one of several ways. We can use the error_reporting and/or display_errors directives mentioned previously, or we can prefix the potentially fallible command with the Error Suppression Operator "@". $webpage = @file_get_contents('http://www.example.com'); In this version, if file_get_contents() is unable to retrieve the data, $webpage will be set to FALSE, but no error will be displayed. Our script may then handle the error gracefully: <?php $webpage = @file_get_contents('http://www.example.com'); if ($webpage === false) { /* Use a "placeholder" webpage for now */ $webpage = '<html><head><title>Example Dot Com Unavailable</title></head><body> We were unable to retrieve the webpage for www.example.com, please try again another time.</body></html>'; } ?>
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