If you did want to display it when the user didn’t have your page open you would have to create a browser plugin or somehow have a Window open (such as a pop-under — *cringe*). But I think it is useful even without that.

Do you have a sample code for this tutorial?

Thanks!

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5305156/printing-1-to-1000-without-loop-or-conditionals-in-php/5318251

My own attempt, which you commented before, can be found at: http://vvv.tobiassjosten.net/php/php-to-1000-without-conditionals-and-loops

First, the question about when an error handler itself throws an error: no, it does not cause an infinite loop (or any loop for that matter). PHP is smart about it and immediately falls through to the default PHP error handler. In the snippet you posted it does the same thing. I was not, able to get your “if (self::$handling_error) {” to trigger (at least in my version of PHP).

Second, as far as output buffering goes: you are correct. In my example, the output of the handler would be sucked up and never displayed.

Technically, the behavior that should happen (to be consistent with PHP) is to honor output buffering on warnings and notices and kill output buffering on errors.

With your code, what might work is to put a try/catch block around the loop in the error handler and put your fall through code inside the “catch” block.

Note: I used PHP 5.3.2 and this is something that I can definitely see changing between versions. Older versions might cause loops, as you say.

Also, just to be clear, the code in this article is not intended for production but more as an example of recursion and closures in PHP 5.3. A production ready error handler should be a lot more robust than this.