Strange connection issue

[siobhan]

My database connection stopped working. I was using the following connection code and hadn't made any changes to anything on the php page or the connection page with this code:

<?php
@ $db = new mysqli('localhost', 'user', 'pass', 'db');

if (mysqli_connect_errno()) {
echo 'Error: Could not connect to database. Please try again later.';
exit;
}
?>

I changed to this code
<?php
function db_connect() {
$result = new mysqli('localhost', 'user', 'pass', 'db');

if (!$result) {
throw new Exception('Could not connect to database. Please try again later.');
} else {
return $result;
}
}
?>

and the connection works.

Why would this be? I don't understand what the difference between the two is and why the first code would stop connecting to the database.

[NogDog]

The 2nd version does not verify that the database was successfully connected to, only that a mysqli object was created.

For the first version, the correct OOP style would be:

$db = new mysqli('localhost', 'user', 'pass', 'db');

if ([color=red]$db->[/color]connect_errno()) {

If you want to find out what the error was, either error_log() or echo out [FONT="Courier New"]$db->connect_error[/FONT].