What is @$variable

Anon

I was looking at this article... http://phpbuilder.com/columns/mattias20000312.php3?page=2

and in the example, he wrote @$userid and stuff like @mysql_num_rows() I was wondering what the @ means, like when you use @$some_variable, etc. Can anyone lead me anywhere? Thanks.

Anon

Hello, when you put a @ in front of a piece of code, it will hide any errors that may come up. For example, in a script I have a line that sends a user a email, if i did not have a @ in front of the line, whenever the mail cmd fails, a bunch of errors would pop and screw up the look of my site. This is way no error pop up, but of course the error is still there it is just not being displayed. Hope this helps!

Jason Rottman
www.stardefenders.com

kparker

That's interesting. I use '@' all the time when calling functions, but what's the usefulness in a simple expression that only involves variables?

Anon

Great, that makes sense, I was just wondering about it, thanks Jason.

Anon

If your warning level is set high enough it can interfere with existence warnings of undefined variables. Placing the @ in front of variables makes sure this doesn't happen.

[deleted]

Cool, another way of making sure you never ever see any errors :-)

And here I was thinking that the point of error_reporting was to notify you that you are using undefined vars (which is a Bad-Thing(tm)), when a simple "@" solves all your troubles... :-)

Anon

I agree with vincent, but I was answering Kirk's question.

[deleted]

;-)

kparker

Doh! It seems real obvious now that it's pointed out.

I can't agree with you completely, in that there are some contexts (most notably POST variables) where a particular variable is likely to be absent some of the time, and an empty string or a zero is a fine default value when it is absent.

[deleted]

Except, it's not a zero or an empty string, it's "unset" which is something that should not be surpressed by an @, it should be checked for using isset().