Are exceptions in php really that useful?

Question

3 days ago I started rewriting one of my scripts in OOP using classes as a practice after reading a lot about the advantages of using OOP.

Now I\'m confused weather I sh

Answer 1

Your question is not uncommon, whether/when to use exception is sometimes a philosophical decision and many experienced developers can't wrap their heads around it.

That being said, I've found that listing out the distinct properties of each way of handling error makes it easy to choose your preferred way:

Return code

• The caller can ignore it or forget to check it
• The caller usually needs more documentation reading before he can use it (does 0 mean success or failure?)
• Object destruction is not guaranteed -- it all depends on the caller to clean up properly

When to use: It's pretty obvious. Use return codes when you trust the caller (internal code or trivial errors which can be safely ignored).

Exceptions

• The caller cannot ignore it
• The caller can still suppress it if he wants (with an empty try/catch)
• Object destruction takes places properly -- most of the time

When to use: When you don't trust your caller as much (third party) or you really need to make sure your error code doesn't go ignored.

Die

• Cannot be ignored and cannot be suppressed

When to use: It's usually obvious enough. You need everything to stop immediately.

(In a PHP context, I don't think it makes much difference. The above suggestions should still apply.)

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(Aside)

Usually it's tempting to just write out an error message when something bad happens (especially when the first programming language you learned is PHP :P). But if you really want to grok OOP, it's not a proper way to handle errors.

Every object or every function should ideally only perform one function. If one function writes error to the screen and does its own thing, it's difficult to later switch to a DatabaseErrorLogger or TextFileErrorLogger or etc. One approach would be to supply a logger to use (this is called Dependency Injection). Another way to do it is to use exception -- this way, the caller gets to choose which ErrorLogger to use.