Question

I have a function to translate the current text string using the Free Bing translator API. I just want to make sure if anything fails or something happens with the Application ID or I go over on requests, I don’t want a big error to show.

The code I have right now is:

$translate_feed = file_get_contents('http://api.microsofttranslator.com/v2/Http.svc/Translate?appId=' . BING_APPID . '&text=' . urlencode($text) . '&from=en&to=' . $to_lan . '');
$translate = simplexml_load_string($translate_feed);

return $translate[0];

What I want to happen is if anything fails, so if I add in another character to the URL to make it invalid then I want it to just return $text so at least something shows.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Have you tried failing it on purpose to see what happens?

If it’s an exception, just catch it and handle it…

try{
    //enter code to catch
}catch(Exception $ex){
    //Process the exception
}

If there is an error outputted by the function, just @ to hide the error and handle the incorrect output of $translate_feed or $translate manually.

You can try failing it on purpose by simply passing an invalid URI to file_get_contents and then forcefully feed non XML or invalid XML to simplexml_load_string to see what happens.