PHP error reporting and mail()

Question

I've currently got set_error_handler() throwing ErrorException whenever anything is encountered. Furthermore, I've got error_reporting() at -1 , so mis-indexing an array throws an exception.

Anyways, that being a cursory overview of my error/reporting environment; the PHP mail() function is tossing errors on my ( Win7 ) dev machine, during a process intended for a project, 'cause I don't have a mail server installed. I tried prefixing it with @ to shut it up, but it still triggers an error, and hence throws an exception. I could wrap it with try{} , but I'm curious as to why it won't shut up.

Why won't it shut up?

To reiterate, we can almost remove mail() from the equation ( so far as I can tell ); I just want to know why @ wouldn't do it's job under such a circumstance, with mail() or any function. I just figured mail() may be special case for some reason.

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Thanks to our friend XDebug :

(: ) ErrorException. mail() [function:mail], Failed to connect to mailserver at "localhost" port 25. verify your "SMTP" and "smtp_port" setting in php:ini or use ini_set() in C.\xampp\htdocs\dbc_relaunch_2-0-0\mf\handlers\api\mail\send.php on line 16

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Alrighty, I've simply gone with:

try{
    mail($args);
catch(Exception $exception){
    return $failure;
}
return $success;

Rather than:

if(@mail($args)){
    return $failure;
}
return $success;

And all is well; I'm browsing the answer @Pheonix linked, but anyone with a short order response as to why this is free to answer.

Answer 1

Could you show us your error handler? Note that your handler will be called in case of an error, regardless of your error_reporting() setting and even if you prepend your function with an @ .

Of particular note is that this value will be 0 if the statement that caused the error was prepended by the @ error-control operator.

From the manual page of set_error_handler() .

If you don't want to throw exceptions for errors caused by an @ prefixed expression, you'll have to check the return value of error_reporting() in your handler. In case it returns zero, you're dealing with a suppressed error.

Answer 2

Here's an Interesting read

How do I catch a PHP Fatal Error

This page discusses exactly what you are trying to achieve.

Answer 3

This isn't a very good answer, but I suspect it's because error 'messages' and error 'exceptions are not the same.

php-exceptions-vs-errors says a little about this, but what I found was that, as per this comment , it appears that set_error_handler() actually overrides the @ symbol.

That said, try, catch is always the best approach when dealing with exceptions.

Hope that helped a little.