PHP: exceptions vs errors?

Question

Maybe I'm missing it somewhere in the PHP manual, but what exactly is the difference between an error and an exception? The only difference that I can see is that errors and exceptions are handled differently. But what causes an exception and what causes an error?

Answer 1

Exceptions are thrown - they are intended to be caught. Errors are generally unrecoverable. Lets say for instance - you have a block of code that will insert a row into a database. It is possible that this call fails (duplicate ID) - you will want to have a "Error" which in this case is an "Exception". When you are inserting these rows, you can do something like this

try {
  $row->insert();
  $inserted = true;
} catch (Exception $e) {
  echo "There was an error inserting the row - ".$e->getMessage();
  $inserted = false;
}

echo "Some more stuff";

Program execution will continue - because you 'caught' the exception. An exception will be treated as an error unless it is caught. It will allow you to continue program execution after it fails as well.