With PHP 3 the error reporting level was set as a simple
numeric value formed by summing up the numbers related to
different error levels. Usual values were 15 for reporting all
errors and warnings or 7 for reporting everything but simple
notice messages reporting bad style and things like that.
PHP 4 has a larger set of error and warning levels and comes with a
configuration parser that now allows for symbolic constants to be used
for setting the intended behavior.
Error reporting level should now be configured by explicitly
taking away the warning levels you do not want to generate error
messages by x-oring them from the symbolic constant
E_ALL. Sounds complicated? Well, lets say you
want the error reporting system to report all but the simple
style warnings that are categorized by the symbolic constant
E_NOTICE. Then you'll put the following into
your php.ini: error_reporting =
E_ALL & ~ ( E_NOTICE ). If you want to suppress
warnings too you add up the appropriate constant within the
braces using the binary or operator '|':
error_reporting= E_ALL & ~ ( E_NOTICE | E_WARNING
).
| Warning |
When upgrading code or servers from PHP 3 to PHP 4 you should
check these settings and calls to
error_reporting() or you might disable
reporting the new error types, especially E_COMPILE_ERROR. This
may lead to empty documents without any feedback of what happened
or where to look for the problem.
|
| Warning |
Using the old values 7 and 15 for setting up error reporting is
a very bad idea as this suppresses some of the newly added error
classes including parse errors. This may lead to very strange
behavior as scripts might no longer work without error messages
showing up anywhere.
This has lead to a lot of unreproducible bug reports in the
past where people reported script engine problems they were not
capable to track down while the TRUE case was usually some
missing '}' in a required file that the parser was not able to
report due to a misconfigured error reporting system.
So checking your error reporting setup should be the first thing
to do whenever your scripts silently die. The Zend engine can
be considered mature enough nowadays to not cause this kind of
strange behavior.
|
A lot of existing PHP 3 code uses language constructs that
should be considered as very bad style as this code, while doing
the intended thing now, could easily be broken by changes in
other places. PHP 4 will output a lot of notice messages in
such situations where PHP 3 didn't. The easy fix is to just
turn off E_NOTICE messages, but it is usually a good idea to fix
the code instead.
The most common case that will now produce notice messages is the
use of unquoted string constants as array indices. Both PHP 3
and 4 will fall back to interpret these as strings if no
keyword or constant is known by that name, but whenever a
constant by that name had been defined anywhere else in the code
it might break your script. This can even become a security risk
if some intruder manages to redefine string constants in a way
that makes your script give him access rights he wasn't intended
to have. So PHP 4 will now warn you whenever you use unquoted
string constants as for example in
$_SERVER[REQUEST_METHOD]. Changing it
to $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] will
make the parser happy and greatly improve the style and security
of your code.
Another thing PHP 4 will now tell you about is the use of
uninitialized variables or array elements.
Parser behavior
