Question

I’m making a little file browser for homework – and I have it working as well as I need to, but I’m a little confused on handling error scenarios in PHP now that I’m trying to refactor my coding.

I’m used to C++/C# try/catch error handling, which PHP seems to have some variant of. What’s confusing me is this:

resource opendir ( string $path [, resource $context ] )

Returns a directory handle resource on success, or FALSE on failure.

If path is not a valid directory or the directory can not be opened
due to permission restrictions or filesystem errors, opendir() returns
FALSE and generates a PHP error of level E_WARNING. You can suppress
the error output of opendir() by prepending ‘@’ to the front of the
function name.

from http://php.net/manual/en/function.opendir.php.

Do I need to catch the generated PHP error of level E_WARNING mentioned there, or is it silly to? I don’t understand why it would return false and throw an error – shouldn’t the error throwing make it so you don’t return normally anyway?

Answer 1

You would use catch in order to deal with a raised Exception. A PHP error is something different. PHP errors have different levels, or severity. You can modify which of these errors is outputted using error_reporting(). In order to suppress an individual PHP error on a statement, use @, like: @opendir(..)