Question

When i do a redirect, no errors are shown.
I use codeigniter framework and there’s

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', 1);

in my index.php file.
When something is breaking in my code(e.g.some ‘undefined index’ error) and i do a redirect to another page – the error isn’t showing. How to avoid this – break the redirect and show the errors?

redirect function is just a simple header:

header('Location: ' . $uri);

I’m assuming this is something connected with output buffers. I’ve tried to turn on buffer(in index.php) using ob_start() but nothing happens.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The approach I take it to use a custom error handler which throws exceptions on any error; this makes sure I don’t miss anything during development. Throwing the exception will cause your code to abort immediately, therefore avoiding the redirect. For the production sites, I disable this (and also disable display_errors, of course). I’ve included simple code to do this below.

/**
 * Function to throw exceptions on any errors.
 */
function exception_error_handler($errno, $errstr, $errfile, $errline ) {
    // Ignore suppressed errors
    if (error_reporting() == 0) { 
        return; 
    }
    throw new ErrorException($errstr, 0, $errno, $errfile, $errline);
}

// Report ALL errors
error_reporting(E_ALL | E_STRICT | E_NOTICE);
// Enable error display
ini_set('display_errors', 1);
// Set the error handler
set_error_handler('exception_error_handler');

Note that this should be done as early as possible in the execution of your script, to catch all errors. Note also that the error_reporting() call may cause too many errors to be reported for your liking; we develop to a very strict standard and I find that throwing exceptions even for E_NOTICE type errors saves me a lot of pain down the line, but it’s up to you.