Suppressing PHP warnings for specific functions using the @ ‘at’ symbol

Some PHP functions, return an error rather than gracefully exit.

Lets take the  file_get_contents() function as an example:

$contents = file_get_contents('/path/to/file.html');

If ‘file.html’ doesn’t exit, then it will return something similar to the following:

<b>Warning</b>:  file_get_contents(path/to/file.html): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in <b>/Users/user/Documents/file.php</b> on line <b>13</b><br />

This is of course, problematic as we’re saving the return value into the $content variable to be output later!

The solution? The magic @ symbol. Simply append it do the front of the function, and warnings are suppressed:

$contents = @file_get_contents('/path/to/file.html');

That’s it! Now if ‘file.html’ doesn’t exist, $contents will simply be empty, which we can check for.

Easy.

source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4358130/file-get-contents-when-url-doesnt-exist#answer-4358136