Prevent E_DEPRECATED error messages in PHP

PHP 5.3 introduced a new error reporting level E_DEPRECATED which is triggered when deprecated functions and methods are used, such as the old style ereg() regular expression functions. This post shows how to suppress E_DEPRECATED error messages.

In PHP.ini

To show all errors other than E_DEPRECATED in the php.ini file, adjust the error_reporting setting as shown below. Note this should only be done for installs of PHP 5.3+.

error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED

To suppress notices as well:

error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE & ~E_DEPRECATED

In code with error_reporting

You can either straight out set the error reporting level like so:

error_reporting(E_ALL &~ E_DEPRECATED);
error_reporting(E_ALL &~ E_NOTICE &~ E_DEPRECATED);

or remove E_DEPRECATED from the current error_reporting level:

error_reporting(error_reporting() & ~E_DEPRECATED);

Making it safe for earlier versions of PHP

The only catch with the above error_reporting examples is that if you're running the same code on e.g. PHP 5.2 as well as PHP 5.3 then you'll get a notice in PHP 5.2 (and earlier) like "Notice: Use of undefined constant E_DEPRECATED".

To avoid triggering this notice check if E_DEPRECATED is defined:

if(defined('E_DEPRECATED')) {
    error_reporting(E_ALL &~ E_DEPRECATED);
}

if(defined('E_DEPRECATED')) {
    error_reporting(error_reporting() & ~E_DEPRECATED);
}

Development vs production

While you certainly won't want to trigger E_DEPRECATED messages in production, you may well want to show them in development to make it easy to locate and update code with deprecated functions. (Note you can suppress the display of error messages regardless of the error_reporting level with display_errors).

In my case, I've been using SilverStripe 2.4 which occasionally makes use of the ereg() functions and I prefer not to have the messages displayed even in development. SS 3 will come out later this year and I'm sure they'll have replaced the ereg functions with preg equivilents. Maybe then I'll switch back E_DEPRECATED in development.

Related posts:

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• Replace error reporting with exception handlers with PHP
• Get and modify the error reporting level in PHP
• Log PHP errors with log_errors and error_log
• PHP is not showing any error messages
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PHP is not showing any error messages

Help! There are errors in my PHP code and there are no error messages being displayed. I've even set error_reporting to E_ALL and still PHP is not displaying the errors. How do I debug it? How do I show the errors? This post looks at the very simple answer to these questions.

display_errors configuration variable

If your PHP script is halting (or not executing code like you expect) and not displaying any error messages even though you know there's an error happening, it's likely that the 'display_errors' configuration setting is switched off.

Check the php.ini file

You can check if display_errors is off by checking the php.ini file. This is located at various different places depending on your operating system or distribution, but is commonly at /etc/php.ini or similar. Open up the file and look for "display_errors" and you'll find something along these lines:

; Print out errors (as a part of the output).  For production web sites,
; you're strongly encouraged to turn this feature off, and use error logging
; instead (see below).  Keeping display_errors enabled on a production web site
; may reveal security information to end users, such as file paths on your Web
; server, your database schema or other information.
display_errors = Off

As the comments state, it's a good idea to switch off displaying errors on a production site but you'd normally want them on on a development server so you can see the reason for the error.

Use ini_get or get_cfg_var

Another way to check the status of the display_errors configuration variable is with the ini_get or get_cfg_var functions as shown in the following example:

echo (integer)ini_get('display_errors')

The reason I've added the (integer) part is to typecast the result as an integer which means either a 0 or 1 will be displayed. Without the type casting nothing will be echoed if display_errors is switched off.

Switching display_errors on

So the reason the errors aren't being displayed is because they're switched off. So how do you switch them back on again? You can either modify the php.ini file and reload the webserver to apply the changes, or modify it in your script for that script only. Obviously you can't change the php.ini file if it's not a webserver you have control over, and it's not a good idea on a production server anyway. So in these cases you'll want to change the value in code.

The ini_set() function allow you to change some of the PHP configuration directives at run time. To switch display errors on for the rest of your script (or until you change the value again), you would do this:

ini_set('display_errors', 1);

Your error messages should now be displayed. Note that setting it this way won't have any affect if the script has fatal errors. This is because the desired runtime action does not get executed.

Related posts:

• Work out PHP's error reporting from an integer value
• Get and modify the error reporting level in PHP
• Log PHP errors with log_errors and error_log
• Set PHP configuration options with an Apache .htaccess file
• Triggering errors with PHP