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Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2016 14:31:18 +0100
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Subject: Throwable and Error exceptions break existing PHP 5.x code
From: giovanni.g@gmail.com (Giovanni Giacobbi)

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Greetings,

Short premise before I get flamed: I know PHP 7 is rolling and it is way
too late for this, that I should've tested the RCs, follow the mailing list
and so on, but I'm a dev like you guys and struggle with the time to do
everything by the book, including reading the previous threads because I'm
pretty sure this was brought up by somebody, but as there are hundreds of
message under the "Throwable" topic and I can't read all of them.

In short I have this situation:

<?php
class SpecificHandler {
  public function exception(Exception $e) {
    .. do something very useful...
  }
}

function global_handler($e) {
  SpecificHandler::exception($e);
}

set_exception_handler("global_handler");
?>

This happens because the specific handler will output the exception
according to the expected format (HTML, JSON, or even an image).

Now after upgrading to PHP7 when one of the new Error exception is thrown,
I get the following error:

PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught TypeError: Argument 1 passed to
SpecificHandler::exception() must be an instance of Exception, instance of
Error given, called in [...]

Having been a PHP dev for 10 years now I know that the policy is to try to
break as little as possible while implementing new features, and I like
that. I know that sometimes things must be broken to progress, but in this
case maybe there is a very simple fix that I can suggest to avoid breaking
existing code, change set_handler_exception like this:

set_exception_handler(callback function, bool also_throwables = false);

The new parameter "also_throwables" defaults to false, so the same
behaviour as before is preserved. If you want it to catch also the new PHP7
Error exceptions, you can just set it to true.

What is your take on this? I know I can easily fix my code to work on both
PHP 5.x and PHP 7.x, but I really disliked this kind of BC.

Kind regards
Giovanni

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