Ignoring errors in file_get_contents HTTP wrapper?

Question

The following code is to query an online thesaurus for a search engine I'm building as a college project, but I'm having problems with file_get_contents "failed to open stream" errors. When I send a word the thesaurus doesn't recognize, it throws up an error. I'm trying to write a piece of code that will ignore the error and just proceed without the information.

$thesaurus_search="http://words.bighugelabs.com/api/2/0089388bb57f/".$this->formatted_query."/php";
$result_thesaurus=file_get_contents($thesaurus_search);

I tried:

if (file_get_contents($thesaurus_search) != NULL)
{ // do stuff }

...but its not working because it still returns some sort of string.

What can I do to handle such cases?

Answer 1

If you don't want file_get_contents to report HTTP errors as PHP Warnings, then this is the clean way to do it, using a stream context (there is something specifically for that):

$context = stream_context_create(array(
    'http' => array('ignore_errors' => true),
));

$result = file_get_contents('http://your/url', false, $context);