Re: Coding standards - inclusion

On 13/10/2009 7:54 PM, Christian Weiske wrote:

Hello Eric,

From http://pear.php.net/manual/en/standards.including.php: "Anywhere you are unconditionally including a class file, use require_once. Anywhere you are conditionally including a class file (for example, factory methods), use include_once." Out of curiosity, why is this the case? What benefits does it offer?

A failed require leads to a fatal error which is not catchable by code. In you library, you should include a file and throw an exception if that failed - this is programmatically verifiable.

Thank-you for the response, and good point. Is there some recommended way of checking success? I thought of this: if (@include 'test.php') echo 'yes'; else throw new Exception('no'); Some say the error control operator is quite slow; is there some advantage to the above vs: if (file_exists('test.php')) require 'test.php'; else throw new Exception('no'); Cheers, Eric