Question

On my development machine, I have PHP set to display all errors (i.e., display_errors is set to on). Unfortunately, PHP sends fatal errors as text/html, which makes reading call stacks a bit of a pain as whitespace is ignored in HTML.

Is there a way to have PHP send pages as text/plain for fatal errors?

Answer 1

A few people in the comments on PHP.net’s set_error_handler() entry suggested using register_shutdown_function() to capture fatal errors. Sure enough, it worked.

I created a file, error.php, with the following:

register_shutdown_function('plain_text_error');

function plain_text_error() {
  if ($e = error_get_last()) {
    header('Content-Type: text/plain');
  }
}

Then added the following to my dev site’s .htaccess file:

php_value auto_prepend_file /path/to/error.php

And voilà, fatal errors rendered as plain text.