[unixbreak]

I would like to post something for today as well

so..

Here's a nice tip about creating your own custom Exceptions very easily by extending the standard Exception class:

PHP Code:

class fileException extends Exception {}

This is very handy when you want to do a bunch of stuff in one go and handle the exceptions centrally but not in exactly the same way.

Suppose that you want to read a value from a file just before you do the query and you’ve created a method to do this:

PHP Code:

function readFile($sFileName) { if (!file_exists($sFileName) { throw new fileException('Sorry, the file could not be found.'); } if (!is_readable($sFileName) { throw new fileException('Hmm, the file is not readable.'); } // read from file ... }

Now you can:

PHP Code:

try { // try to read from the file $value = readFile('somefile.log'); // try to query db $res = mysql_query("UPDATE .... WHERE something='$value’"); } catch (fileException $e) { // now you can easily send a mail to the admin to tell him to create the file or similar echo $e->getMessage(); } catch (Exception $e) { // and over here you can email yourself to fix the db connection echo $e->getMessage(); } // while to the user it all looks the same

This example doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in the real world but I hope you get the idea.
It’s very handy if you need to send error-messages to different people or if the flow of an application should go in different directions, depending on the exception.