Question

I’m reviewing code that was written by another developer. The code tries to open a file, and sets $canOpen based on success/failure.

$fh = @fopen('files.php', 'a+');        
if (!$fh){
   fclose($fh);
   $canOpen = false;
} else {
   $canOpen = true; 
}

What I find strange is that it also tries to close the file but only when the open fails if (!$fh). Does this make sense? Shouldn’t the close be in the else statement when the file was successfully opened?

Answer 1

No, it makes no sense.

If !$fh is met as a condition, it means the $fh contains boolean FALSE (or possibly, in the event of some weird internal PHP error, NULL). So what you are effectively doing is:

fclose(FALSE);

…which is pointless and will result in an error.

And, if all you’re trying to do is populate the $canOpen variable and not do anything useful with the file handle, wouldn’t a combination of is_file(), is_readable() and is_writable() suffice?