Errors -> E_NOTICE discussion

[knowj]

Quick question to get peoples opinions on on best practice with E_NOTICE errors when building a system.

I use magic methods/overloading throughout my systems and I find I am forever checking if a variable isset() this is also the case when it comes to Superglobals ($GET, $POST).

An example could be a simple equality comparison:

<?php
if (isset($_GET['category']) && ($_GET['category']=='archive'))
{
//do this
}
else
{
//do this
}
?>

Without the isset() E_NOTICE kicks in and starts moaning about an undefined index. I am checking that $_GET['category'] is equal to a value whether its set or not isn't really important because anything other than 'archive' will return false.

I always dev with it but sometimes you start to think what is the point of writing a load of extra code for values you know are going to be empty some of the time or you are checking that they meet criteria in other was.

What are peoples opinions when it comes to E_NOTICE errors?

[big_nerd]

knowj,

There are many projects, code & items I have downloaded in the past that disregard 'best practices' with regards to E_NOTICE.

I personally prefer to follow them, albeit additional coding, it will generally help you with future releases of PHP.

For instance short_tags was quite common for a while and now, due to XML is considered a bad idea.

In the end of it all, if you're planning on releasing the software in any capacity (and especially if you are charging for it) you should follow best practices since you may not be in total control of the server environment, whereby sys admins can block out functions, such as ini_set() and error_reporting(), effectively making your script announce to the world about the undefined indexes.

If this is on your own server (VPS/Dedicated) and you have control over the environment, and that's where the code will be kept, you can really do whatever makes you feel comfortable.

That's my take...

[cahva]

I mainly code using Codeigniter framework and it has separate input class(or library) for handling $POST, $GET etc. So you dont have to check with the isset first as its handled in the input library already. So the code for example checking the category from post array would be:

if ($this->input->post('category') == 'archive')
{
    ...
}

That would return FALSE if the $_POST['category'] is not set at all.

This probably applies for the other frameworks too. But if you dont use frameworks, you could easily create your own input library which you can use to check if the post variable exists and slap some xss-clean in there too 🙂