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.