Question

The functions I have written are throwing exceptions if they can’t do their job. For the productive environment I thought to redirect the exception to a nice looking error page. Therefore I’m thinking of setting the exception handler set_exception_handler on the beginning of every script. How does the error page know which error occured? I thought of putting an error code into the URL like header("Location: error.php?code=1234"). While in the development phase I just would not set the exception handler, thus every exception would be printed onto the php default error screen Uncaugt Exception: … with all usefull informations.

I have read Exceptions in PHP – Try/Catch or set_exception_handler? but don’t know how to write a front controller script and also think this is maybe to much the effort.

I’m a PHP beginner who likes to handle errors in the right way, but I’m just not sure if I’m doing it right or wrong. Do you think it’s ok doing it like above described or do you have other suggestions?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Don’t redirect. In your exception handler function just output the error page at that point (or include a PHP file which includes the error page HTML). You also want to set an appropriate status code (using the PHP header function).

Edit: Why not to redirect:

• You want to return an appropriate HTTP status code on your error pages (usually 404, 403, 400, 500 or 503 depending on the cause), so that search engine robots know not to index the error, crawlers can identify broken pages, browsers know not to cache the page and so on. If you redirect, you are returning a 301/302 HTTP status code and not one of the error ones.
• You want users to be able to refresh the page with the error on, in case it was a temporary glitch. If you redirect them to another URL, however many times they refresh they will always see your error page (since that’s the page they’re on).