Disabling PHP Error Messages

Question

I am working on my own custom error handler function. Currently I am trying to disable error reporting so it wont display errors to public users. However it is not working.

<?php

// Disable error reporting.
ini_set( "error_reporting", 0 );

// Create an error.
echo "hi

?>

This returns this error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected end of file, expecting variable (T_VARIABLE) or ${ (T_DOLLAR_OPEN_CURLY_BRACES) or {$ (T_CURLY_OPEN) in C:\xampp\htdocs\websites\sicsportsagency.com\includes\test.php on line 7

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You can disable error reporting for syntax errors, just for any other sort of error. But there’s a catch.

Using ini_set like you’re doing works for errors besides syntax errors because ini_set (presumably) runs before the code that has the error in it. With syntax errors in the same file, not so. PHP must parse the whole file before it can even begin to execute the first line of code. If it encounters an error in parsing, even if that error is further along in the file, it’s still parsing and not yet executing: it hasn’t had the chance to run ini_set.

The most straightforward solution would be to edit php.ini so the appropriate setting is set before even parsing begins.

If you can’t do that, you might have to have to put the code that has a potential syntax error in another file, and then the original file can ini_set and require the second. Since require will only parse the required file at the point of execution of the require, you can be sure that ini_set will run before any parse error in the required script can occur.