The PHP Developer Blog has a quick post for the unit testers out there on how to work with exception handling in your tests.

When unit testing, you'd also want to test whether your application throws Exceptions as expected (the following examples are based on SimpleTest). Assumption for the examples is, that we have a method that expects an integer as parameter.

Putting the assertion inside of the catch block won't work correctly since it wouldn't happen unless an exception is thrown. Instead he recommends putting it right after the exception try/catch and check to see if the exception variable is a type of 'Exception' (with another potential solution of adding in a check for an 'InvalidArgumentException').

In this new entry to his blog Quinton Parker looks at some strangeness he's found around the try/catch functionality in PHP. His specific example involves file_get_contents.

PHP never ceases to amaze me. Just the other day a colleague discovered that you can suppress error messages reported by file_get_contents() using the try-catch statement. That should've raised an eyebrow.

His sample code shows the normal error that a file_get_contents on a nonexistent file would give then wraps it in a try/catch. The same path is put into the file_get_contents but, because of some sort of interesting handling, isn't reported in the catch. He's at a loss and is asking for help figuring this one out from the readers out there. Be sure to leave a comment if you have more info.

There's two new posts that look at an up and coming PHP IDE (really a PHP plugin for an existing IDE) - NetBeans - one from Mike Borozdin and another from Juozas Kaziukenas.

Here's some of Mike's comments:

NetBeans is mostly known for Java developers as a good and free IDE. At the same time recently NetBeans started supporting other languages, like C/C++, Ruby and finally PHP. Moreover it not only supports plain PHP, but it offers quite good support of HTML and JavaScript. [...] Generally, I feel pretty good about NetBeans. It seems to be working much faster than Eclipse, both in terms of the loading time and in terms of code editing and code completion as well.

And some thoughts from Juozas:

I find more more articles about NetBeans 6.5 IDE for PHP, for example this Mike's article. Why people like it so much? After some weeks spent reading all these articles, I finally decided to throw away all other editors and try new-and-shiny NetBeans. [...] Overall it's just a wonderful tool - stable, helpful and being actively developed. Give it a try!

DevShed has start up a new series today with the first part in a four-part series looking at exception handling in PHP5.

If you do any serious programming, whether it's in PHP 5 or some other language, you've needed to know how to handle run time errors and other "exceptional" conditions. You can do this by making your program throw generic exceptions. Or you can unlock the potential of PHP 5 and learn how to create custom exceptions, which is the subject of this four-part series.

In this first part they get you started with exceptions, showing how to throw them and catch them correctly (try/catch). They put it to good use in an example catching exceptions thrown from a MySQL connection and select.

In a recent blog entry Stefan Priebsch shows how to take an error thrown by your script and turn it into an exception (to make things like catchable fatal errors).

While I would personally prefer an exception to be thrown in the first place, it is pretty easy to convert errors to exceptions in PHP.

His example is pretty simple - you set a custom error handler in your script that pulls in the error information and tosses an exception based on the error number the handler is given. Then you can use the try/catch method to see if your script has tossed an exception of the fatal error type. Nice simple solution to handle an interesting little problem.

On his blog today Martynas Jusevicius talks about a feature that was new in PHP5 - Exceptions:

A useful new feature in PHP 5 is exception handling via the try/throw/catch paradigm. An exception may be thrown and caught. If an exception is thrown in code surrounded by try, the following statements will not be executed, and the exception will be handled by the first matching catch block.

He gives a high-level overview of how Exceptions in PHP5 work and includes a simple example from his work with his DIY Framework.

In working with his code recently, Tim Koschuetzki noticed something odd with a block of try/catch code:

I just noticed today, that PHP's try catch blocks require curly braces. Anybody has an idea why it is like that? I have used curly braces by default up until now, so I just stumbled upon this weirdness today.

He includes two examples, one with a curly brace after the catch clause and the other without. This is different than several other control structures (like ifs) that don't require the curly brace when there's only the one line following it.

Exceptions and warnings can be tossed out from your code at some odd locations sometimes. There's a few options that you have when they jump out, including pushing them out to an error log or just ignoring them completely. Alexander Netkachev has a different solutions, though - handling them with something already built into PHP, using exception reporting.

This coding tip demonstrates how to deal with PHP core notices and warning (aka recoverable errors) in the exception way, using try/catch statement.

IT's a simple idea, but it can definitely help you keep all of you errors in one place. The sample code he gives shows both a basic idea of the solution and a bit more complex example, providing more detailed messages for different exception types.