PHP error_reporting() Cheat Sheet

By  on  

Error handling is important in any programming language and PHP is no exception. Lucky, error handling in PHP is extremely easy to set up. The following is a quick cheat sheet for PHP, straight from PHP.net.

Error Levels

The following values and constants can be used within the error_reporting() function.

value constant
1 E_ERROR
2 E_WARNING
4 E_PARSE
8 E_NOTICE
16 E_CORE_ERROR
32 E_CORE_WARNING
64 E_COMPILE_ERROR
128 E_COMPILE_WARNING
256 E_USER_ERROR
512 E_USER_WARNING
1024 E_USER_NOTICE
6143 E_ALL
2048 E_STRICT
4096 E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR

Basic Usage

The following is basic usage of PHP's error reporting (using only one level).

//show nothing
error_reporting(0);

//show everything
error_reporting(E_ALL);

//using php.ini and ini_set()
ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL);

Advanced Usage

The following accounts for multiple error reporting levels.

//show warnings and errors
error_reporting(E_ERROR | ERROR_WARNING);

//show all types but notices
error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE);

Custom Error Handling

Visit my article, Custom Error Handling in PHP, to learn about custom error handling in PHP.

Previous Error

To grab information on the last error, you can code:

//returns an array with error number, message, file, and line
error_get_last();

Recent Features

  • By
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

  • By
    5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About

    CSS and JavaScript:  the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release.  They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely.  We have our .js files and our .css, but...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Implementing Basic and Fancy Show/Hide in MooTools 1.2

    One of the great parts of MooTools is that the library itself allows for maximum flexibility within its provided classes. You can see evidence of this in the "Class" class' implement method. Using the implement method, you can add your own methods to...

  • By
    Create an Animated Sliding Button Using MooTools

    Buttons (or links) are usually the elements on our sites that we want to draw a lot of attention to. Unfortunately many times they end up looking the most boring. You don't have to let that happen though! I recently found a...

Discussion

  1. kenman

    Just throwing this out there…..I’ve found this to be a very handy snippet which I’ve used for single pages and for complete applications both:

    In short, if the remote visitor is someone who should see errors, they will get them all, otherwise all errors are hidden. Sometimes I’ll add an extra $_GET variable check so that I can explicitly turn errors off or on, using something like $_GET[‘debugme’]. I realize that this isn’t the best solution for large applications, but its simplicity makes it hard to beat many times.

  2. kenman

    errr… lets try again with the code:

    $devIPs = array(
        gethostbyname('office.mycompany.com'),
        gethostbyname('me_at_home.dyndns.org')
    );
    define( 'MY_DEBUG', in_array($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'], $devIPs) );
    error_reporting(E_ALL * MY_DEBUG);
    
  3. Good tip Ken…man!

  4. You may also want to the opposite, not to show any errors if they are not the dev.

  5. BigNose

    But in the latter case (no errors if not the dev) you really should be looking at setting display_errors to off rather than altering the errors that are reported. Shouldn’t you?

  6. Thanks Man Great tip :)

  7. Error Levels has been Updated Now in new version of PHP.

  8. Art

    This is the best tool for figuring out PHP error reporting:

    http://www.bx.com.au/tools/ultimate-php-error-reporting-wizard

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!