Now that we know, how to log errors in any system developed in PHP, we can move to our next section for keeping track of these logged errors. If you haven’t read how to log errors, read part 1 of error handling in PHP.
To keep track of these logged errors, we need to create a script to read those log files in a systematic way. Refer to the below code to read log files,
public function errorLogs($filePath = 'error.log') {
$fileContent = file($filePath);
$errorsArray = array();
if(sizeof($fileContent) == 0) {
return false;
}
foreach($fileContent as $row) {
$errors = explode(": ", $row);
if(empty($errors[1])) continue;
$errorsArray[] = $errors;
}
return array_reverse($errorsArray, true);
}Explanation:
$fileContent = file($filePath);This line of code will read the file line by line from the provided file path.
if(sizeof($fileContent) == 0) {
return false;
}After reading the file, if the size of the file content is 0 then, the function will return false. So, the purpose of this function is to stop the execution of the function if the provided file is empty and returns false.
foreach($fileContent as $row) {
$errors = explode(": ", $row);
if(empty($errors[1])) continue;
$errorsArray[] = $errors;
}This part of the function will loop through the log contents row by row. For each row, it will explode the line with ‘:’ to separate the date and actual error details.
If the error details are empty for any row, it will skip that row. Otherwise, it will collect the errors in another array.
return array_reverse($errorsArray, true);The last line of the function will reverse the error data and returned the reversed result. So, that we can see the latest errors first.
This way we can create a simple function to display the list of errors in a tabular format from the error log files we generated for each of the modules in the application system.