How can I reliably identify a specific error in PHP?

Question

Because of PHP\'s unlink() not supporting exceptions natively, I\'m making a wrapper function for it. It should throw a FileNotFoundException if, w

Answer 1

I've seen php error messages change quite a bit over the years. Maybe, try to detect a change in the last error over a very granular piece of code, and then result to string parsing in a very loose manor.

$lastErr = error_get_last();
unlink($file);
if ($lastErr !== error_get_last()) {
    // do something
    //maybe string parsing and/or testing with file_exists, is_writable etc...
}

Answer 2

I believe it(i.e. your code) should be portable enough as it is... As regards a better way to achieve the same thing, i would do things differently (although the code is simple, it's also more readable...so bear with me)

function deleteFile($file_path){
    if(!is_file($file_path)){
        throw new Exception("The path does not seem to point to a valid file");
    }
    if(!file_exists($file_path)){
        throw new Exception("File not found!");
    }
    if(unlink($file_path)){
        return true;
    } else {
        throw new Exception("File deletion failed!");
    }
}

Of course you can always compress and improve on the code...hop this helps!

Answer 3

I would simplify the code:

public function deleteFile($path){

    if (!file_exists($path) {
        throw new FileNotFoundException();
    }else{
        unlink($path);
    }

    if (file_exists($path) {
        throw new FileNotDeleted();
    }
}

Then you don't have to catch the $errstr and do complicated error catching. And it will work down to PHP 4 when exceptions were introduced.

Answer 4

While reading trough my old questions I came across the ErrorException, combined with set_error_handler() this would be a automatic Error to Exception transformer for all native PHP errors:

function exception_error_handler($errno, $errstr, $errfile, $errline ) {
    throw new ErrorException($errstr, 0, $errno, $errfile, $errline);
}
set_error_handler("exception_error_handler");

/* Trigger exception */
unlink('Does not exitsts'); 

Can anybody prof this?