I've seen function calls preceded with an at symbol to switch off warnings. Today I was skimming some code and found this:
$hn = @$_POST['hn'];
What good will it do here?
5 Answers
I'm answering 11 years later for completeness regarding modern php.
Since php 7.0, the null coalescing operator is a more straightforward alternative to silencing warnings in that case. The ?? operator was designed (among other things) for that purpose.
Without @, a warning is shown:
$ php -r 'var_dump($_POST["hn"]);'
PHP Warning: Undefined array key "hn" in Command line code on line 1
NULL
The output with silencing warnings (@):
$ php -r 'var_dump(@$_POST["hn"]);'
NULL
Obtaining the same result with the modern null coalescing operator (??):
$ php -r 'var_dump($_POST["hn"] ?? null);'
NULL
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