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How can I catch a "catchable fatal error" on PHP type hinting?

Asked 2010-03-18T08:59:03.080
102

I am trying to implement Type Hinting of PHP5 on one of my class,

class ClassA {
    public function method_a (ClassB $b)
    {}
}

class ClassB {}
class ClassWrong{}

Correct usage:

$a = new ClassA;
$a->method_a(new ClassB);

producing error:

$a = new ClassA;
$a->method_a(new ClassWrong);

Catchable fatal error: Argument 1 passed to ClassA::method_a() must be an instance of ClassB, instance of ClassWrong given...

Is it possible to catch that error(since it says "catchable")? and if yes, how?

php fatal-error type-hinting
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1 Answer

118

Update: This is not a catchable fatal error anymore in php 7. Instead an "exception" is thrown. An "exception" (in scare quotes) that is not derived from Exception but Error; it's still a Throwable and can be handled with a normal try-catch block. see https://wiki.php.net/rfc/throwable-interface

E.g.

<?php
class ClassA {
  public function method_a (ClassB $b) { echo 'method_a: ', get_class($b), PHP_EOL; }
}
class ClassWrong{}
class ClassB{}
class ClassC extends ClassB {}


foreach( array('ClassA', 'ClassWrong', 'ClassB', 'ClassC') as $cn ) {
    try{
      $a = new ClassA;
      $a->method_a(new $cn);
    }
    catch(Error $err) {
      echo "catched: ", $err->getMessage(), PHP_EOL;
    }
}
echo 'done.';

prints

catched: Argument 1 passed to ClassA::method_a() must be an instance of ClassB, instance of ClassA given, called in [...]
catched: Argument 1 passed to ClassA::method_a() must be an instance of ClassB, instance of ClassWrong given, called in [...]
method_a: ClassB
method_a: ClassC
done.

Old answer for pre-php7 versions:
https://www.php.net/manual/en/errorfunc.constants.php#constant.e-recoverable-error says:

E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR ( integer )
Catchable fatal error. It indicates that a probably dangerous error occured, but did not leave the Engine in an unstable state. If the error is not caught by a user defined handle (see also answered 2010-03-18T09:09:38.317

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