Re: Fatal Errors and Error Handling

"Christian Reiniger" <creinig@mayn.de> wrote in message news:01042417490700.07614@chrisbig... >Well, "needed to use" might be incorrect, because return value evaluation >can be used instead (unless some functions never signal errors via their >return value). Aside from that you're right. OK, I will try to clarify my original problem... At http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.xslt-process.php there is an example program. When I use it as is, it works all right and produces a nice table. Here is a short section of the code: ----- [...] if (xslt_process($xslData, $xmlData, $result)) { [...] } else { echo "There was an error that occurred in the XSL transformation...\n"; echo "\tError number: " . xslt_errno() . "\n"; echo "\tError string: " . xslt_error() . "\n"; exit; } ?> ----- This is quite similar to what I am trying. If you now corrupts the xmlData variable, e.g. by changing <article> to <rticl> without changing the closing tag, you will get an error message saying <br> <b>Fatal error</b>: XML parser error 7: mismatched tag in <b>/var/www/test.php</b> on line <b>40</b><br> As you can see here, xslt_process() dies with a fatal error and the program is terminated, and we never get to testing the return value. The next problem, is that since the error is "fatal", it is also not possible to use set_error_handler() to catch the error. And placing the @-sing before the variable only supresses the default error-message, which is not an acceptable solution to us. The last thing I tried, was the error_prepend_string and error_append_string in php.ini, but it is very difficult making a valid error-message this way. Because of the unclosed <br> tags we don't get a valid xml-message. And because of the <b> and <br> tags, it would not comply with the error-message format we need to use anyway. And using the @-sing causes error_append/prepend_string to be ignored alltogether. And in my opinion, there are too many things that can cause PHP to die with a fatal error. So we simply *must* be able to handle it and give a valid and reasonable error-message back. -- Svein Roar Nilsen Norwegian Hydrographic Services