Error handling in PHP

Solution:1

One thing to add to what was said already is that it’s paramount that you record any errors in your web application into a log. This way, as Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood suggests, you’ll know when your users are experiencing trouble with your app (instead of “asking them what’s wrong”).

To do this, I recommend the following type of infrastructure:

• Create a “crash” table in your database and a set of wrapper classes for reporting errors. I’d recommend setting categories for the crashes (“blocking”, “security”, “PHP error/warning” (vs exception), etc).
• In all of your error handling code, make sure to record the error. Doing this consistently depends on how well you built the API (above step) – it should be trivial to record crashes if done right.

Extra credit: sometimes, your crashes will be database-level crashes: i.e. DB server down, etc. If that’s the case, your error logging infrastructure (above) will fail (you can’t log the crash to the DB because the log tries to write to the DB). In that case, I would write failover logic in your Crash wrapper class to either

• send an email to the admin, AND/OR
• record the details of the crash to a plain text file

All of this sounds like an overkill, but believe me, this makes a difference in whether your application is accepted as a “stable” or “flaky”. That difference comes from the fact that all apps start as flaky/crashing all the time, but those developers that know about all issues with their app have a chance to actually fix it.

Solution:2

Roughly speaking, errors are a legacy in PHP, while exceptions are the modern way to treat errors. The simplest thing then, is to set up an error-handler, that throws an exception. That way all errors are converted to exceptions, and then you can simply deal with one error-handling scheme. The following code will convert errors to exceptions for you:

function exceptions_error_handler($severity, $message, $filename, $lineno) {
  if (error_reporting() == 0) {
    return;
  }
  if (error_reporting() & $severity) {
    throw new ErrorException($message, 0, $severity, $filename, $lineno);
  }
}
set_error_handler('exceptions_error_handler');
error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_STRICT);

There are a few cases though, where code is specifically designed to work with errors. For example, the schemaValidate method of DomDocument raises warnings, when validating a document. If you convert errors to exceptions, it will stop validating after the first failure. Some times this is what you want, but when validating a document, you might actually want all failures. In this case, you can temporarily install an error-handler, that collects the errors. Here’s a small snippet, I’ve used for that purpose:

class errorhandler_LoggingCaller {
  protected $errors = array();
  function call($callback, $arguments = array()) {
    set_error_handler(array($this, "onError"));
    $orig_error_reporting = error_reporting(E_ALL);
    try {
      $result = call_user_func_array($callback, $arguments);
    } catch (Exception $ex) {
      restore_error_handler();
      error_reporting($orig_error_reporting);
      throw $ex;
    }
    restore_error_handler();
    error_reporting($orig_error_reporting);
    return $result;
  }
  function onError($severity, $message, $file = null, $line = null) {
    $this->errors[] = $message;
  }
  function getErrors() {
    return $this->errors;
  }
  function hasErrors() {
    return count($this->errors) > 0;
  }
}

And a use case:

$doc = new DomDocument();
$doc->load($xml_filename);
$validation = new errorhandler_LoggingCaller();
$validation->call(
  array($doc, 'schemaValidate'),
  array($xsd_filename));
if ($validation->hasErrors()) {
  var_dump($validation->getErrors());
}