Ask HN: Purpose of the AT operator in PHP?

1 pointsby xdvor 14 Jahren3 comments

I've been using PHP for well over a decade now and I always remembered the use of the @ operator being a last resort against "noisy" modules that would throw spurious warnings/errors that could be safely ignored. Those days have long gone (or have they?) .. but @ remains as far as I can tell for backwards compatibility.

Anyway, after seeing it come up as part of many arguments against PHP and realising it is actually used by developers in everyday error handling! I've tried to find a reference to it's correct use in the docs, source and web but to no avail.

Does anyone else remember it as I do, or is this just a figment of my imagination.

3 comments

shane-armstrongvor 14 Jahren

Three years of debugging and writing code and I have never seen an @ used, I would consider getting rid of the key but I need the darned thing for logging in to my hotmail :(

cd34vor 14 Jahren

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.errorcontrol...

xdvor 14 Jahren

I'm looking for a reference to the @ operator being used to suppress spurious module errors. I'd not spent the last decade oblivious to the PHP manual.