Question

Quick question, what is the difference between the following two declarations:

define('I_LIKE_AT_SIGNS', false);

and

@define('I_LIKE_AT_SIGNS', true);

I.e. what does the @-sign do?

Answer 1

The @ symbol is PHP’s only error control operator, and when prepended to any expression, all errors associated with that expression are suppressed.

In this case, any errors associated with your define expression will be suppressed.

Use of the @ error suppression technique generally isn’t encouraged or recommended. Instead, it’s much better to use other error capture techniques so you can detect and handle the error.