Question

This question specifically relates to my experience with PHP, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t apply to other languages.

Having set ERROR_REPORTING(E_ALL); during testing, I noticed that I had some notices, such as Notice: Undefined offset: 0 in ChrisW/public_html/admin.php on line 122. This comes about as I store warnings about a form (unfilled values, invalid values, etc) in an array, and then access them:

echo $errorsArray[0] . '<label for="name" id="name-label">Your Name</label>
<input id="name" name="name" value="' . $name . '" />';

with my errors array being $errorsArray = array($nameError, $emailError); in my validation function. The 1st time the page is loaded, I show the form:

if(count($_POST) == 0)
{
  $name="";
  $email="";
  $errorsArray = array();
  form_display($name, $number, $errorsArray); 
}

In an ideal world:

• does it matter about the notices?
• should I initialise the array by doing $errorsArray("","");, or
• Should I check if the array is empty when I reference it (such as by changing echo $errorsArray[0] to echo (count($errorsArray[0])==0 ? "" : $errorsArray[0])?

Hopefully, there’ll be a fairly black and white answer – I don’t want to cause a long discussion!

Answer 1

Production code SHOULD NOT raise notices. This causes scroll blindness – you get used to having a lot of meaningless messages, so you don’t notice the important one (until it’s too late).

Random comments:

• it’s not really important how you avoid notices, in your case it might be initializing $errorsArray to an empty array;
• holding errors in an array like that is probably not the best idea anyway. Now you have two styles of passing data to your view: one by global variables ($name, $password), one by values indexed by numbers ($errorsArray[0], $errorsArray[1]). The first one is better, the second one is OK, and you could think of some better ones ($data[‘name’][‘errors’]). But the general rule is: stick to one way of doing things. As an old Polish saying goes: “może być chujowo, byle jednakowo” (roughly translated: might not be the best way, but at least it’s uniform).