Quick question about "@" before functions

[Sekka]

What is the significance of "@" before a function? What does it do?

Thank you.

[dreamcatcher]

Hi Sekka,

Its an error suppression symbol. You can see a little more info on it here:

[uk.php.net...]

Its not good coding practice to use it.

dc

[hughie]

i find it useful when dealing with arrays that might or might not be an array at the time.

I sometimes use

if (@in_array($needle,$haystackArray))
{

}

rather than
if (is_array($haystackArray))
{
if (in_array($needle,$haystackArray))
{
//
}
}

is that bad form?

[coopster]

Its not good coding practice to use it.

I think what dc really meant to say is that it does indeed have it's purposes and times of use, but DO NOT use it to substitute for taking care of error messages that should be dealt with prior to allowing code to go out to production.

[dreamcatcher]

Thanks Coop, that is indeed what I meant. :)

[Sekka]

Ahhhhh, so that's what it does.

Well, as a rule I never use error surpression, I try and deal with them before they arise.

Thank you for the help!

[eelixduppy]

>>>as a rule I never use error surpression

After the development stage, it is a good idea to suppress errors just in case one arises, valuable information won't be displayed to the browser. This can be done simply by adding error_reporting(0); to the top of the script.

[jatar_k]

for a production site you should just have display_errors off and send them to a log instead

error_reporting(0) means if something is going on you won't know ;)

[eelixduppy]

That makes sense; Sorry about that. Thanks Jatar.

[jatar_k]

well, the thing is anyone on shared hosting may not have access to php.ini so your solution is right for that

no need to apologize ;)