

Ask HN: Purpose of the AT operator in PHP? - xd

I've been using PHP for well over a decade now and I always remembered the use of the @ operator being a last resort against "noisy" modules that would throw spurious warnings/errors that could be safely ignored.  Those days have long gone (or have they?) .. but @ remains as far as I can tell for backwards compatibility.<p>Anyway, after seeing it come up as part of many arguments against PHP and realising it is actually used by developers in everyday error handling! I've tried to find a reference to it's correct use in the docs, source and web but to no avail.<p>Does anyone else remember it as I do, or is this just a figment of my imagination.
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shane-armstrong
Three years of debugging and writing code and I have never seen an @ used, I
would consider getting rid of the key but I need the darned thing for logging
in to my hotmail :(

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cd34
[http://us3.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.errorcontrol...](http://us3.php.net/manual/en/language.operators.errorcontrol.php)

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xd
I'm looking for a reference to the @ operator being used to suppress spurious
module errors. I'd not spent the last decade oblivious to the PHP manual.

