Muting errors in PHP5
 

My bad - I missed my missing semicolon :P

Just come across something very confusing. In PHP4 we could mute errors caused by a function by using @function().

I'm using PHP5 on this server and I get:

Lines 24-25:
Now I'd assume PHP would throw an error notifying this doesn't work - I have errors set to E_ALL - rather than a parse error and I can't find anything on php.net - any ideas?

for me it works ...
try with include_once($config_file); ...

Yes, you did miss your semicolon :-P However, this thing you're doing it's not called 'error muting', it's called error suppression. What's really happening is this: the error is still thrown in the back, except it's not shown to you. That's why this is bad and you should rather use error_reporting to control when and what errors to show. Oh, and because it's global. You don't have to set error_reporting before any statement, you just put it in the beginning of the script and that's it. You can, however set error reporting to a certain level until some point of your script, then change its value (turn it on/off depending on the case). Not the case with error suppression, where the @ must be in front of EVERY statement that throws some kind of error/notice/warning.

Thanks for your reply. So supposing I didn't want to display any PHP errors on a production system (obviously) - I could use errr_reporting(E_ALL) to show them to logged in Administrators?

Thanks for this - didn't realise I was following a bad practise!

Personally... I turn error reporting completely off for production systems. Error reporting should be used for development purposes, then if anything should go amiss properly capture the error and display a generic 'error has occured' page.

Although only turning it on for administrators and not general users is a better idea then jut turning it on for everyone. Hackers and malicious users tend to look for these error messages to give them clues.