Suppressing PHP Errors & Warnings Using @

Discussion

1. David Walsh

   Quick Update: Doing this is not recommended for large web applications as it can be very expensive.
2. ZoFreX

   This is the worst advice I’ve ever heard. This is an old post so I assume (hope) you realise that now, but it ranks very highly on Google, so if you just got here from a search:

   DO NOT DO THIS

   Errors are thrown for a reason, David is correct that displaying them to end-users is incorrect (it’s messy and potentially a security issue), and that errors should be correctly handled. Ignoring is not handling! You can set your php.ini for production and turn off displaying errors, logging them instead, and you can create a custom error handler for more advanced things. Whatever you do, don’t just ignore them!
• FredWallace

  As he points out, some people may not “have complete control of [their] hosting environment”. That means not everyone has the luxury of editing php.ini.
• Nemo

  “Worst advice I ever heard” is a very harsh comment. In the right context the @ trick can be very useful.

  Take for instance the getimagesize function that returns size and other information for an image file. The nice thing about it is that it can work with a URL. But what if the URL is no longer valid? It throws up an error. It is far more elegant to simply absorb that error with an @getimagesize and then detect it by checking to see if the length of the “array” returned is less than 7.

  Thank you, David. I have used @ once or twice but I always have to hunt around for it each time I need it.
• Stephen

  Whilst errors should be handled properly it’s impossible to plan for everything that might go wrong. In that case it would be better to suppress the error on a production site than publicly reveal details about the site’s inner workings.
  As stated by others, people might not have control of their php.ini file but it should be noted that errors can be supressed throughout the rest of the script with:
  ini_set(‘display_errors’, 0);
• Raptorak

  He was writing this from the perspective of people who have no other choice. For example, on a shared hosting environment you’re not likely to have any control over php.ini, so you can’t change those settings. This is, of course, different if dealing with a VPS or dedicated server.
• zofrex

  There are still other workarounds that are better than this, you can add custom error handlers without needing php.ini access.

  The problem with doing this is it will squash all errors and send them into /dev/null, and your script will keep on running merrily and then probably explode at a later point, making it very difficult to track down where the actual issue is.
3. Neo

   Cool, never thought about that! This will work great in my CLI scripts ;)

   Thanks
4. jeff

   Agree with the statement this is very bad advice. Following this will likely leave you hunting bugs and running wild.

   Usually good advice found here. Updating this blog post would be a VERY good idea, since it ranks so high!
5. Patrick D

   Super helpful, thanks. I don’t necessarily agree with the other comments on here – I think you should just note that this should only be used with great caution and only when absolutely necessary. If there’s another way to approach it, that’s probably preferred, but there are absolutely times when you have to whip this out.
6. Edward

   Well, this was useful, when try-catch doesn’t (seem) to work.
   I see lots of comments about avoiding this, but imagine the following…

   You have a webpage, A, that is displaying a PHP image, B. B loads another PHP image, C, and then adds/overlays some graphics ontop. B picks up a random file from a directory and sends information from this file to C. C then reads this information and gets to work on generating an image. Now, if the processing of this file exceeds the Maximum Allowed Memory you can use and you can’t do anything about that, C will return a FATAL ERROR which is recived by imagecreatefrompng, which will return a Warning, and A won’t be able to show the image because it won’t understand a “Warning” image format. Deciding that C can be ignored, but the rest of B is a little more important, I tried to try-catch, but it still displayed the warning. Now I know of @, seems easier… Yeah, I’m lazy, maybe I should wrap that imagecreatefrompng in some custom error handler. That way I might later print the error message onto the B image.

   /Edward
7. Hari Rao

   Hi David,

   I spent to much time in finding where the problem is but your technique is really awsum. This has helped me to narrow down where the issue is.

   Thanks
   Hari
8. Lightinthedark

   Between the following:
   http://php.net/manual/en/function.register-shutdown-function.php
   http://php.net/manual/en/function.set-error-handler.php
   http://php.net/manual/en/function.set-exception-handler.php
   and proper use of try / catch blocks you should be able to avoid the use of this (blunt tool) error suppression
9. Roger

   Using silents on your code is an absolutely fucking disaster. DO NOT DO THIS.
   Very bad advice.
10. clyzby

    Just wanted to throw in my 2 cents on how I have found error suppression to be useful for decoding json and for it to

     // don't flood the logs
     $data = @json_decode($response);
    
      if ($data == null && json_last_error() != JSON_ERROR_NONE) {
        // but handle error
      }