Re: Undefined Variables

On 2/14/2013 1:54 PM, Stuart Dallas wrote:

Sorry for the top post! I don't know numbers, but my gut instinct is that the cycles wasted raising the notice (it gets raised even if it goes nowhere so turning display and log doesn't remove the hit completely) are better spent executing defensive code. There is no reason, ever, that production code should raise notices about which you don't care. If PHP is telling you something might be wrong, something might be wrong! And if you're investigating the code already, figure out what's happening and deal with it properly. Only lazy and/or developers ignore notices. If you're one of them and this statement offends you, you probably know it's right! -Stuart

I agree with Stuart. To minimize the overhead of testing every possible undefined variable with isset(), I assign them at the top of the page which uses them. e.g., $userInstrHtmlSizeWarning = false; $currentUserRecArray = array(); if(!isset($_SESSION['pwPassed']))$_SESSION['pwPassed'] = false; I also have this snippet at the top of my app config file. if(true){ // TRUE for debug only ini_set("display_errors", "on"); //use off if users will see them error_reporting(E_ALL) $error_reporting = '<span style="color:red">Error display and logging on</span> '; } else $error_reporting=null; I put this at a convenient place on the page so I don't forget to turn off the error reporting when the code goes live. if($error_reporting) echo $error_reporting;