Difference between revisions of "Best Practices"

Revision as of 19:51, 30 January 2010

Use E_ALL

During development, set the error reporting to E_ALL, i.e. the highest warning level. This helps expose common errors like uninitialized variables.

Tip: In lib-common.php, add an extra error_reporting(E_ALL) statement like so:

// Prevent PHP from reporting uninitialized variables
error_reporting(E_ERROR | E_WARNING | E_PARSE | E_COMPILE_ERROR | E_USER_ERROR);
error_reporting(E_ALL);
/**
* This is the common library for Geeklog.  Through our code, you will see

Adding the error_reporting in this otherwise empty line means that you only get an additional one-line difference when doing a hg diff (or similar). It's also easier to remove than when you edit the existing error_reporting line.

Don't use the ereg family of functions

The ereg pattern matching functions (ereg_replace, etc.) will be removed in PHP 6. They are already throwing "deprecated" warnings in PHP 5.3.

Use str_replace (preferred) or preg_replace and similar functions instead.

Also see: Bug #0000967: Get rid of the ereg functions