try..catch
blocks can be used to control the flow of a program where Exceptions may be thrown. They can be caught and handled gracefully rather than letting PHP stop when one is encountered:
try {
// Do a bunch of things...
throw new Exception('My test exception!');
} catch (Exception $ex) {
// Your logic failed. What do you want to do about that? Log it:
file_put_contents('my_error_log.txt', $ex->getMessage(), FILE_APPEND);
}
The above example would catch
the Exception thrown in the try
block and log it's message ("My test exception!") to a text file.
You can implement multiple catch
statements for different types of exceptions to be handled in different ways, for example:
try {
throw new InvalidArgumentException('Argument #1 must be an integer!');
} catch (InvalidArgumentException $ex) {
var_dump('Invalid argument exception caught: ' . $ex->getMessage());
} catch (Exception $ex) {
var_dump('Standard exception caught: ' . $ex->getMessage());
}
In the above example the first catch
will be used since it matches first in the order of execution. If you swapped the order of the catch
statements around, the Exception
catcher would execute first.
Similarly, if you were to throw an UnexpectedValueException
instead you would see the second handler for a standard Exception
being used.
If you need something to be done after either a try
or a catch
has finished running, you can use a finally
statement:
try {
throw new Exception('Hello world');
} catch (Exception $e) {
echo 'Uh oh! ' . $e->getMessage();
} finally {
echo " - I'm finished now - home time!";
}
The above example would output the following:
Uh oh! Hello world - I'm finished now - home time!
In PHP 7 we see the introduction of the Throwable
interface, which Error
as well as Exception
implements. This adds a service contract level between exceptions in PHP 7, and allows you to implement the interface for your own custom exceptions:
$handler = function(\Throwable $ex) {
$msg = "[ {$ex->getCode()} ] {$ex->getTraceAsString()}";
mail('[email protected]', $ex->getMessage(), $msg);
echo myNiceErrorMessageFunction();
};
set_exception_handler($handler);
set_error_handler($handler);
Prior to PHP 7 you can simply typehint Exception
since as of PHP 5 all exception classes extend it.