Joshua Thijssen: PHP5.5: Try/Catch/Finally

Joshua Thjissen has a new post to his site today about a feature that's been introduced in the upcoming PHP 5.5 release of the language - the addition of "finally" to try/catch exception handling. He gets into it a bit more technically than just the "introductory" level, discussing parent/child exception handling and using returns.

Exception handling is available in PHP since version 5. It allows you to have a more fine-grained control over code when things go wrong ie, when exceptions occur. But since PHP 5.5, exception handling has finally evolved into what it should have been from the beginning: the "finally" part has been implemented.

He includes a basic example showing how a certain part is always executed, regardless of if the exception is thrown or not. He also shows how a "chained catch" would work to catch multiple kinds of exceptions and when the "finally" is run as it relates to the "trickle down" handling of exceptions. He then gets a little more complex and introduces "return" into the mix. Of special note, even if you return, the "finally" will still get called.