@ symbol before php function [duplicate]

Answer 1

It's the error suppression operator, normally not a good idea to use it as you should be trapping errors cleanly rather than simply hiding them

Answer 2

It will silent error messages. See http://php.net/manual/en/language.operators.errorcontrol.php

Answer 3

It means that if an error is generated by that function, it is not shown. It suppresses the error so to say. As the PHP manual states:

PHP supports one error control operator: the at sign (@). When prepended to an expression in PHP, any error messages that might be generated by that expression will be ignored.

Look here for more information: http://php.net/manual/en/language.operators.errorcontrol.php