How can you enable error reporting in php?

(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

error_reporting — Sets which PHP errors are reported

Description

error_reporting(?int $error_level = null): int

Parameters

The new error_reporting level. It takes on either a bitmask, or named constants. Using named constants is strongly encouraged to ensure compatibility for future versions. As error levels are added, the range of integers increases, so older integer-based error levels will not always behave as expected.

The available error level constants and the actual meanings of these error levels are described in the predefined constants.

Return Values

Returns the old error_reporting level or the current level if no error_level parameter is given.

Changelog

Examples

Example #1 error_reporting() examples

// Turn off all error reporting
error_reporting(0);// Report simple running errors
error_reporting(E_ERROR | E_WARNING | E_PARSE);// Reporting E_NOTICE can be good too (to report uninitialized
// variables or catch variable name misspellings ...)
error_reporting(E_ERROR | E_WARNING | E_PARSE | E_NOTICE);// Report all errors except E_NOTICE
error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE);// Report all PHP errors
error_reporting(E_ALL);// Report all PHP errors
error_reporting(-1);// Same as error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL);?>

Notes

Tip

Passing in the value -1 will show every possible error, even when new levels and constants are added in future PHP versions. The behavior is equivalent to passing E_ALL constant.

See Also

• The display_errors directive
• The html_errors directive
• The xmlrpc_errors directive
• ini_set() - Sets the value of a configuration option

info at hephoz dot de ¶

14 years ago

If you just see a blank page instead of an error reporting and you have no server access so you can't edit php configuration files like php.ini try this:

- create a new file in which you include the faulty script:

error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set("display_errors", 1);
include("file_with_errors.php");
?>

- execute this file instead of the faulty script file

now errors of your faulty script should be reported.
this works fine with me. hope it solves your problem as well!

jcastromail at yahoo dot es ¶

1 year ago

Under PHP 8.0, error_reporting() does not return 0 when then the code uses a @ character. 

For example

$a

dave at davidhbrown dot us ¶

16 years ago

The example of E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE is a 'bit' confusing for those of us not wholly conversant with bitwise operators.

If you wish to remove notices from the current level, whatever that unknown level might be, use & ~ instead:

//....
$errorlevel=error_reporting();
error_reporting($errorlevel & ~E_NOTICE);
//...code that generates notices
error_reporting($errorlevel);
//...
?>

^ is the xor (bit flipping) operator and would actually turn notices *on* if they were previously off (in the error level on its left). It works in the example because E_ALL is guaranteed to have the bit for E_NOTICE set, so when ^ flips that bit, it is in fact turned off. & ~ (and not) will always turn off the bits specified by the right-hand parameter, whether or not they were on or off.

Fernando Piancastelli ¶

17 years ago

The error_reporting() function won't be effective if your display_errors directive in php.ini is set to "Off", regardless of level reporting you set. I had to set

display_errors = On
error_reporting = ~E_ALL

to keep no error reporting as default, but be able to change error reporting level in my scripts.
I'm using PHP 4.3.9 and Apache 2.0.

luisdev ¶

4 years ago

This article refers to these two reporting levels:

// Report all PHP errors (see changelog)
error_reporting(E_ALL);

// Report all PHP errors
error_reporting(-1);

What is the difference between those two levels?

Please update this article with a clear explanation of the difference and the possible use cases.

adam at adamhahn dot com ¶

5 years ago

To expand upon the note by chris at ocproducts dot com. If you prepend @ to error_reporting(), the function will always return 0.

error_reporting(E_ALL);
var_dump(
    error_reporting(), // value of E_ALL,
    @error_reporting() // value is 0
);
?>

keithm at aoeex dot com ¶

12 years ago

Some E_STRICT errors seem to be thrown during the page's compilation process.  This means they cannot be disabled by dynamically altering the error level at run time within that page.

The work-around for this was to rename the file and replace the original with a error_reporting() call and then a require() call.

Ex, rename index.php to index.inc.php, then re-create index.php as:

error_reporting(E_ALL & ~(E_STRICT|E_NOTICE));
require('index.inc.php');
?>

That allows you to alter the error reporting prior to the file being compiled.

I discovered this recently when I was given code from another development firm that triggered several E_STRICT errors and I wanted to disable E_STRICT on a per-page basis.

kc8yds at gmail dot com ¶

14 years ago

this is to show all errors for code that may be run on different versions

for php 5 it shows E_ALL^E_STRICT and for other versions just E_ALL

if anyone sees any problems with it please correct this post

ini_set('error_reporting', version_compare(PHP_VERSION,5,'>=') && version_compare(PHP_VERSION,6,'<') ?E_ALL^E_STRICT:E_ALL);
?>

qeremy ! gmail ¶

7 years ago

If you want to see all errors in your local environment, you can set your project URL like "foo.com.local" locally and put that in bootstrap file.

if (substr($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'], -6) == '.local') {
    ini_set('display_errors', 1);
    ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL);
    // or error_reporting(E_ALL);
}
?>

Rash ¶

7 years ago

If you are using the PHP development server, run from the command line via `php -S servername:port`, every single error/notice/warning will be reported in the command line itself, with file name, and line number, and stack trace.

So if you want to keep a log of all the errors even after page reloads (for help in debugging, maybe), running the PHP development server can be useful.

lhenry at lhenry dot com ¶

2 years ago

In php7,  what was generally a notice or a deprecated is now a warning : the same level of a mysql error …  unacceptable for me.

I do have dozen of old projects and I surely d'ont want to define every variable which I eventually wrote 20y ago.

So two option: let php7 degrade my expensive SSDs writing Gb/hours or implement smthing like server level monitoring ( with auto_[pre-ap]pend_file in php.ini) and turn off E_WARNING

Custom overriding the level of php errors should be super handy and flexible …

huhiko334 at yandex dot ru ¶

3 years ago

If you get a weird mysql warnings like "Warning: mysql_query() : Your query requires a full tablescan...", don't look for error_reporting settings - it's set in php.ini.
You can turn it off with
ini_set("mysql.trace_mode","Off");
in your script
http://tinymy.link/mctct

rojaro at gmail dot com ¶

11 years ago

To enable error reporting for *ALL* error messages including every error level (including E_STRICT, E_NOTICE etc.), simply use:

(-1); ?>

j dot schriver at vindiou dot com ¶

21 years ago

error_reporting() has no effect if you have defined your own error handler with set_error_handler()

[Editor's Note: This is not quite accurate.

E_ERROR, E_PARSE, E_CORE_ERROR, E_CORE_WARNING, E_COMPILE_ERROR and E_COMPILE_WARNING error levels will be handled as per the error_reporting settings.

All other levels of errors will be passed to the custom error handler defined by set_error_handler().

Zeev Suraski suggests that a simple way to use the defined levels of error reporting with your custom error handlers is to add the following line to the top of your error handling function:

if (!($type & error_reporting())) return;

]

Alex ¶

15 years ago

error_reporting() may give unexpected results if the @ error suppression directive is used.

@include 'config.php';
include 'foo.bar';        // non-existent file
?>

config.php
error_reporting(0);
?>

will throw an error level E_WARNING in relation to the non-existent file (depending of course on your configuration settings).  If the suppressor is removed, this works as expected.

Alternatively using ini_set('display_errors', 0) in config.php will achieve the same result.  This is contrary to the note above which says that the two instructions are equivalent.

chris at ocproducts dot com ¶

5 years ago

The error_reporting() function will return 0 if error suppression is currently active somewhere in the call tree (via the @ operator).

vdephily at bluemetrix dot com ¶

17 years ago

Note that E_NOTICE will warn you about uninitialized variables, but assigning a key/value pair counts as initialization, and will not trigger any error :
error_reporting(E_ALL);$foo = $bar; //notice : $bar uninitialized$bar['foo'] = 'hello'; // no notice, although $bar itself has never been initialized (with "$bar = array()" for example)$bar = array('foobar' => 'barfoo');
$foo = $bar['foobar'] // ok$foo = $bar['nope'] // notice : no such index
?>

fredrik at demomusic dot nu ¶

17 years ago

Remember that the error_reporting value is an integer, not a string ie "E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE".

This is very useful to remember when setting error_reporting levels in httpd.conf:

Use the table above or:

ini_set("error_reporting", E_YOUR_ERROR_LEVEL);
echo ini_get("error_reporting");
?>

To get the appropriate integer for your error-level. Then use:

php_admin_value error_reporting YOUR_INT

in httpd.conf

I want to share this rather straightforward tip as it is rather annoying for new php users trying to understand why things are not working when the error-level is set to (int) "E_ALL" = 0...

Maybe the PHP-developers should make ie error_reporting("E_ALL"); output a E_NOTICE informative message about the mistake?

teynon1 at gmail dot com ¶

10 years ago

It might be a good idea to include E_COMPILE_ERROR in error_reporting.

If you have a customer error handler that does not output warnings, you may get a white screen of death if a "require" fails.

Example:
  error_reporting(E_ERROR | E_WARNING | E_PARSE);

  function

misplacedme at gmail dot com ¶

13 years ago

I always code with E_ALL set.
After a couple of pages of
$username = (isset($_POST['username']) && !empty($_POST['username']))....
?>

I made this function to make things a little bit quicker.  Unset values passed by reference won't trigger a notice.

function test_ref(&$var,$test_function='',$negate=false) {
    $stat = true;
    if(!isset($var)) $stat = false;
    if (!empty($test_function) && function_exists($test_function)){
        $stat = $test_function($var);
        $stat = ($negate) ? $stat^1 : $stat;
    }
    elseif($test_function == 'empty') {
        $stat = empty($var);
        $stat = ($negate) ? $stat^1 : $stat;
    }
    elseif (!function_exists($test_function)) {
        $stat = false;
        trigger_error("$test_function() is not a valid function");
    }
    $stat = ($stat) ? true : false;
    return $stat;
}
$a = '';
$b = '15';test_ref($a,'empty',true);  //False
test_ref($a,'is_int');  //False
test_ref($a,'is_numeric');  //False
test_ref($b,'empty',true);  //true
test_ref($b,'is_int');  //False
test_ref($b,'is_numeric');  //false
test_ref($unset,'is_numeric');  //false
test_ref($b,'is_number');  //returns false, with an error.
?>

kevinson112 at yahoo dot com ¶

4 years ago

I had the problem that if there was an error, php would just give me a blank page.  Any error at all forced a blank page instead of any output whatsoever, even though I made sure that I had error_reporting set to E_ALL, display_errors turned on, etc etc.  But simply running the file in a different directory allowed it to show errors!

Turns out that the error_log file in the one directory was full (2.0 Gb).  I erased the file and now errors are displayed normally.  It might also help to turn error logging off.

https://techysupport.co/norton-tech-support/

Daz Williams (The Northeast) ¶

13 years ago

Only display php errors to the developer...

if($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']=="00.00.00.00")
{
  ini_set('display_errors','On');
}
else
{
  ini_set('display_errors','Off');
}
?>

Just replace 00.00.00.00 with your ip address.

forcemdt ¶

8 years ago

Php >5.4

Creating a Custom Error Handler

set_error_handler("customError",E_ALL);
function customError($errno, $errstr)
  {
  echo "Error: [$errno] $errstr
";
  echo "Ending Script";
  die();
  }

DarkGool ¶

17 years ago

In phpinfo() error reporting level display like a bit (such as 4095)

Maybe it is a simply method to understand what a level set on your host
if you are not have access to php.ini file

$bit = ini_get('error_reporting');
while ($bit > 0) {
    for($i = 0, $n = 0; $i <= $bit; $i = 1 * pow(2, $n), $n++) {
        $end = $i;
    }
    $res[] = $end;
    $bit = $bit - $end;
}
?>

In $res you will have all constants of error reporting
$res[]=int(16) // E_CORE_ERROR
$res[]=int(8)    // E_NOTICE
...

&IT ¶

2 years ago

error_reporting(E_ALL);
if (!ini_get('display_errors')) {
    ini_set('display_errors', '1');
}