Question

I am working with a previous developers code and a lot of his code hide errors with the @

One example being:

if(!file_exists($filename)) 
    throw new Exception("file '$filename' does not exist.");

$xmlObject = @simplexml_load_file($filename);       
if($xmlObject === false) 
    throw new Exception("Could not load '$filename' check syntax and file has read permission.");

I understand that using the @ hides errors but is this good practice or bad?

Answer 1

It’s bad. You should always check to make sure everything is legit. Developing good clean code will allow you to identify issues when something does go wrong. By using the @ it will suppress those errors which could be caused by something else entirely. You would never know and troubleshooting becomes that more difficult.

Taking your example above.

$xmlObject = @simplexml_load_file($filename);

That person is already checking if the file exists. You could probably remove that @ symbol and change it up with try catch blocks.

Try {
  $xmlObject = simplexml_load_file($filename);
catch....