CodeSOD: An Exceptional Warning

Pierre inherited a PHP application. The code is pretty standard stuff, for a long-living PHP application which has been touched by many developers with constantly shifting requirements. Which is to say, it's a bit of a mess.

But there's one interesting quirk that shows up in the codebase. At some point, someone working on the project added a kinda stock way they chose to handle exceptions. Future developers saw that, didn't understand it, and copied it to just follow what appeared to be the "standard".

And that's why so many catch blocks look like this:

catch(ZendException $e) {$e = $e // no warning}

Pierre and a few peers spent more time than they should have puzzling over the comment, before they realized that an empty catch block would give you a warning about an "unused variable" in their linter. By setting the variable equal to itself, it got "used".

This is in lieu of, y'know, disabling that warning, or even better- addressing the issue by making sure you don't just blindly swallow exceptions and hope it's not a problem.

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