Hi! > Even this is a scary way to do it. As you don't know which exception > class you have, how would you know how to handle each separately. You'd > have to if ($caught instanceof InvalidArgumentException) etc to be sure > that what you're doing with the object is allowed.
I just recently had a case where I used something similar in Java code, so I can tell when it's useful: - You call some complex object that can fail for a lot of reasons (like HTTP client talking to remote service) - It can fail with a number of exceptions because something went bad - i.e. network is bad, DNS is bad, server is down, service is too busy, your request syntax is wrong, request is correct but you're not allowed to execute it, etc. - These causes can be roughly separated into two groups - requests that we can and should repeat - e.g. "server too busy" situation, and those that we should not repeat, e.g. "bad syntax" situation - Furthermore, failures can be "soft" - fail this request but continue next ones in the batch, or "hard" - drop everything and call for help because something is seriously broken. In this situation, grouping exceptions - which, due to being from different layers of the complex object do not follow any single structure - becomes very convenient. Of course it is possible to write a long tree of copy-paste handlers for each of the three cases, but it's annoying. Much cleaner to have just three branches. And of course I don't want to do something like catch(Exception) because *shudder*... > say, it's very likely they should be handled differenty anyway. Or > rather, very generically, which you can do with "catch (Exception $e)". catch(Exception) is practically never a good idea, unless you really are able to handle *every* exception. Now in PHP that includes parse errors, type errors, etc. I don't think any random code - except for a very generic final error handler - would ever want to do that. -- Stas Malyshev smalys...@gmail.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
