PHP and warnings

Question

Sometimes when golfing in PHP, one uses tricks as reading/pushing to an inexistent variable, or using deprecated functions such as split(), but those things outputs Warnings and Notices, which by themselves are not really errors and don't change how the code works.

Is there any policy regarding the output of these type of errors?

Should I add provisions to remove or hide the warnings in my code even if the questions doesn't ask it as a requirement or should I consider that the PHP configuration has error_reporting = 0?

I have seen C answers that output compiler warnings (the closest equivalent I can think now)

Answer 1

Assume Default Settings

I have been informed with some frequency that my PHP solutions "don't work", typically due to an abundance of E_NOTICE messages. I suggest the following settings be assumed by default:

short_open_tag = On
precision = 14
error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE & ~E_STRICT & ~E_DEPRECATED

These are all default values, as they would be without a configuration file. For example, the following should be valid, even in challenges where producing any errors is prohibited:

<?for(;$i++<10;);

despite generating an E_NOTICE, due to accessing a previously undefined variable. This message is by default not displayed. On a similar note, suppressing errors with @ should also be allowed in these cases.

Answer 2

There currently is no policy about that, but this is my opinion:

• Does the question explicitly disallow code that can lead to a Warning/Notice? Then it is disallowed.
• Does the question say nothing about such code? Then it would say it is allowed (and you can assume that error_reporting = 0), because none of the rules say that it is disallowed.