PHPDeveloper.org

PHPFreaks.com: Debugging: A Beginner's guide

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:59:13 -0500

On PHPFreaks.com there's a new tutorial providing a beginner's guide to debugging in PHP (with the built in functionality PHP has, not external software).

Everyday the forums see probably hundreds of topics posted where the problem is a fairly simple error. [...] As a beginner, it can be difficult to find and solve these errors. By tackling each of these in turn, I hope to teach you some methods of finding and solving them.

They look at the different sorts of errors - syntax errors, fatal errors, warnings, notices - as well as some of the ones a bit harder to track down like database problems and logical errors.

Greg Beaver's Blog: multiple __HALT_COMPILER(); no longer raises notices PHP 5.2.2+

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 08:03:00 -0500

Greg Beaver points out an obscure problem he came across when working with the new _HALT_COMPILER token in PHP 5:

A quick note about an obscure problem peculiar to PHP files that make use of PHP 5's new __HALT_COMPILER(); token. Prior to PHP 5.2.2, if you included two files that contained the __HALT_COMPILER(); token, you would get a notice that __COMPILER_HALT_OFFSET__ was already defined.

This posed a problem for him as he needed it to throw this error for the phar library format. His solution? To patch his installation (PHP5, the PHP6 patch is here) to make the problem a non-issue.

Ivo Jansch's Blog: System.out.print in PHP

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 07:12:44 -0600

Ivo Jansch discovered something interesting by way of an applicant's resume - a hidden "trick" that PHP pulls on the user when they try to use a Java-like syntax with System.

So yesterday I was reviewing a code sample that a job applicant had written during a test and I encountered the following line of code: It's not hard to guess what his background was :), but I was initially stunned that this actually works in php.

After a little investigating (and ruling out the Java Bridge), Ivo found that the line was being interpreted literally and was just being handled as a string instead of a constant. He gives two other examples to help with clarification.

Derick Rethans' Blog: Overloaded properties (__get)

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 08:43:00 -0600

While testing the eZ components framework on the latest version of PHP (PHP 5.2), Derick Rethans noticed a problem - a new "Notice" message appearing related to a __get call.

The first issue is an extra notice in some cases. This all works 'fine' with PHP 5.1, however with PHP 5.2 the [following] notice was generated for this code.

The cause? Well, the magic function __get only returns the variables in read mode so they cannot be written to. In Derick's situation, there was a foreach that was trying to use the values in a read/write mode. As a result, the error was tossed. He does provide a workaround, though, involving casting the information into an array.

Pierre-Alain Joye's Blog: PEAR Template IT bugs fixes release

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 07:37:38 -0500

Pierre-Alain Joye notes today that there were some issues with the PEAR HTML_Template_IT package he's a lead programmer for.

An annoying bug in the ITX callback system introduced a couple of months ago has been fixed. I would force me to write 100 more tests if I forgot again to run them before a release. But the bug seems to not have affected too much people (no related bug report) :-)

The other two are a PHP notice and a warning. For some reason fread decided to raise a warning when the content is zero, it will be fixed in PHP soon, but I still have to fix it in my code.

You can either check out the HTML_template_IT homepage for more or just grab it directly.

Justin's Blog: Debugging Php

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 07:22:32 -0600

On his blog, Justin has posted an article from David Sklar today - a look at PHP error reporting - conifguration, locating errors, and checking variable values as the script runs.

Whether you're a PHP newbie or a wizard, your programs are going to have bugs in them. Nobody's perfect.

This article gives you some techniques for finding and fixing the problems in your programs. It covers three topics: how to get the PHP interpreter to report the errors that interest you, how to locate basic syntax errors in your program, How to check the values of variables as your program is running.

The configuration section mentions the display_errors and log_errors options to help debug your scripts. There's also a bit describing what the different error types mean (parse, fatal, strict) and simple things to look for to handle them. He also suggests some other resources to look at to help with more detailed error reporting...