PHP has come a long way. I used to program with Global vars then $HTTP_POST_VARS and then $_POST and even did a foreach to convert all Posted/Get-ed vars to their respective variable names. But I never faced any issue till the time I started using error_reporting(E_ALL).My life changed. Initially I started pulling my hairs and then I realised that I will be bald very soon and then started concentrating on writing better code. Avoiding on the fly variables. Yesterday at work, I again realised the value of
error_reporting(E_ALL).I created a small piece of code and tested it in a temp php file. It looked superb. I ported the code to production environment and it started breaking. I thought for a while. May be I have introduced some parse errors. I ran a php -l test and didnt see any syntax error. I read the whole code line by line. Even did a diff. Still the temporary php code was running fine and the code in production environment was not working fine. :-/
I decided to look at the code bit later. After a break of 15 minutes I decided to write a unit test and capture everything. And then I found a notice message telling me I was accessing an index that didn’t exist. I looked at my data set. It was a long range of number, 6184 to be precise and an index value 280 was not set. I looked at my temp file and found my code was not going thru error reporting and production environment was set up to halt at all notices and warnings. Damn it!
