What's the best way to handle errors?

earthlingzed

I 'm looking for advice and examples for how to best handle error reporting to the user and error logging across an entire web application. Is there a popular class that people use for this? What are the important things to keep in mind when dealing with errors? Does anyone have a good example they can share?

Thanks!

MarkR

Personally I wrap them up in exceptions, then they fall through to my uncaught exception handler.

This then does some processing e.g.

In production: show custom error page, log error, email error (if not too many have happened already today)
In development: show error on page, log error

In both cases all details such as the contents of $GET, $POST and several other things are included in the error report, except in HTTPS, where the contents of $_POST are omitted to avoid logging credit card details etc.

Mark

earthlingzed

That's helpful, Mark. Do you happen to have a sample class or block of code to share that I can get a better understanding from?

bpat1434

You can use the set_error_handler() to completely dictate how errors will be handled.

In the book PHP 5 for Professionals they go over an error exception class to replace that of PHP's. You can also look at the documentation on set_error_handler() and that gives you a "crude" overview of an error handler function.

Weedpacket

The user note from fjoggen in the manual's chapter on [man]exceptions[/man] describes a minimalist PHP error => exception converter.