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The Joel on Software Discussion Group (CLOSED)

I've tried to look up what the @ operator does in PHP using the online help manual at

http://www.php.net/manual

but failed.

What does @ do in PHP?

The line of code in question is:

$mail_sent = @mail( $to, $subject, $message, $headers );

The error control operator: http://us.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.errorcontrol.php

it makes it so the function won't display error messages.

Warning are suppressed. It's like silent fail.

Generally you'll use that when you want to handle any errors yourself rather than having PHP output the error message to the client and possibly abort. One thing to watch out for, especially when porting code written for a newer PHP: If you call a nonexistent function with @, your script will abort with no error message.

@ is the bad coder's magic cure

try/catch is the good coder's tool

try..catch is wrong tool if you want to completely ignore an error.  @ is so much simpler and more straight forward.  It's a very rare thing to use but occasionally it makes sense.

@ doesn't "ignore" an error - it prevents an error message being written out to the web page you're producing.

The error still occurs, and must still be handled (or can still be ignored) in exactly the same way as without the @ prefix.

A valid use in my book is to replace this:

if ( IsSet ( $_GET['SomeVar'] ) && Trim ( $_GET['SomeVar'] ) != '' )
{ ... }

with this:

if ( Trim ( @$_GET['SomeVar'] ) != '' )
{ ... }

in other words: use it when you absolutely know what you are doing and know the results (eg: don't throw @ in your code just because you don't know how to fix a error message :).