When does the @ become useful?

Question

As you know, the @ characters before a php istruction suppress every eventual warning, error or notice from being raised.

Personally, i dont like this tecnique, becose i prefer to handle those errors, and in a real life, the error must no happen or have to be managed.

By the way, i find this tecnique to be applied in many scripts (cms plugins, open-source classes).

So, could the @ really be useful (in this case, an example would be appreciated), or is just for lazy developers?

Answer 1

Just think of, for example, a failed mysql_connect call. You may want to suppress the error message otherwise shown to the user (also showing some details you usually don't want anybody else to see) in this case.

Though the PHP warning was suppressed via the @-sign, you can perform certain actions like showing a friendly error message to the user afterwards.

However "misusing" @ for things like in the example below is definitely not a good idea:

@$undefinedVariable .= 'some text';

There are far more examples for bad use of the error-suppression sign out there than the one above, you should only use it when there is no other, better way to achieve what you want.