Failing with grace and artistry

1 Jun 2007

, ,

One of the problems I’ve always had with PHP error handling is catching the fatal errors. If a php script encounters a fatal error it stops, and the desired error handling code does not get executed.

So the user will (usually) be confronted with a blank screen and, worse still, since the error isn’t logged I don’t know about it and therefore can’t fix it.

It’s a rare and confident user who will report a blank page or other such glitch; people are so used to working with a certain level of pain when using a computer that they just assume it’s unavoidable or that it’s been caused by their own inadequacy in some way.

Anyway, (thank-you PHP London user group) I now have a solution using the register_shutdown_function()

<?
register_shutdown_function('cleanExit');

// ... go and do all sorts of exciting stuff ...

$running = false;

function cleanExit() {
	if ($GLOBALS['running'])) {
		// script is still running - it's an ERROR
		// tell Bronwen about the error
		// tell user it's not their fault
	}
}
>

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