A reminder about triggering errors not in the USER level

Jul 21, 2007 php

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I had a function in some of my code that I wanted to trigger a notice error on certain occasions. Unfortunately, it kept halting my script with a Warning instead. Unfortunately, the error handler at that particular block of code was not properly capturing the error string. It runs out that I was triggering an E_NOTICE instead of an E_USER_NOTICE error… (if I would have reviewed the trigger_error manual page, I wouldn’t have made this mistake… silly, lazy developer). Just to make sure that I fully understood this issue and hopefully wouldn’t make the same mistake again, I made a quick proof of concept:

From the comments on the manual page, I was able to grab a pre-made function that I stripped down. It prints out the error type as well as the error string. My test script also generates an error.

function my_error_handler($errno, $errstr, $errfile, $errline) {
  switch($errno){
    case E_ERROR:             print "Error";                  break;
    case E_WARNING:           print "Warning";                break;
    case E_PARSE:             print "Parse Error";            break;
    case E_NOTICE:            print "Notice";                 break;
    case E_CORE_ERROR:        print "Core Error";             break;
    case E_CORE_WARNING:      print "Core Warning";           break;
    case E_COMPILE_ERROR:     print "Compile Error";          break;
    case E_COMPILE_WARNING:   print "Compile Warning";        break;
    case E_USER_ERROR:        print "User Error";             break;
    case E_USER_WARNING:      print "User Warning";           break;
    case E_USER_NOTICE:       print "User Notice";            break;
    case E_STRICT:            print "Strict Notice";          break;
    case E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR: print "Recoverable Error";      break;
    default:                  print "Unknown error ($errno)"; break;
  }
  print '<br />string: ' . $errstr;
}
 
set_error_handler('my_error_handler');

Now, when I do the following:

trigger_error('test error', E_USER_NOTICE);

Our output is predictable:

User Notice
string: test error

However, I was forgetting to put the USER in that error:

trigger_error('test error', E_NOTICE);

And my error:

Warning
string: Invalid error type specified

So just a reminder, you can only trigger errors in the USER class.