Question

What are some reasons why PHP would force errors to show, no matter what you tell it to disable?

I have tried

error_reporting(0); ini_set('display_errors', 0);  

with no luck.

Answer 1

Note the caveat in the manual at http://uk.php.net/error_reporting:

Most of E_STRICT errors are evaluated at the compile time thus such errors are not reported in the file where error_reporting is enhanced to include E_STRICT errors (and vice versa).

If your underlying system is configured to report E_STRICT errors, these may be output before your code is even considered. Don’t forget, error_reporting/ini_set are runtime evaluations, and anything performed in a ‘before-run’ phase will not see their effects.

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Based on your comment that your error is…

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_VARIABLE, expecting ‘,’ or ‘;’ in /usr/home/REDACTED/public_html/dev.php on line 11

Then the same general concept applies. Your code is never run, as it is syntactically invalid (you forgot a ‘;’). Therefore, your change of error reporting is never encountered.

Fixing this requires a change of the system level error reporting. For example, on Apache you may be able to place…

php_value error_reporting 0

in a .htaccess file to suppress them all, but this is system configuration dependent.

Pragmatically, don’t write files with syntax errors 🙂