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The @ symbol in PHP is the error control operator. When prepended to an expression, it intentionally suppresses diagnostic error messages (such as notices, warnings, or deprecations) that the specific expression might generate during runtime. 
@expression;

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Technical Mechanics

The @ operator is a unary operator that temporarily alters the engine’s error reporting level for the exact duration of the expression’s evaluation.
  • Valid Operands: It can only be applied to expressions. This includes variable access, function and method calls, constant evaluations, and language constructs that evaluate as expressions (e.g., include, require, print, isset, empty).
  • Invalid Operands: It cannot be prepended to statements, control structures (e.g., if, foreach, while), or function/class definitions.
// Valid syntax
$value = @$array['missing_key'];
$result = @some_function();
@include 'optional_file.php';

// Invalid syntax (Parse error)
@if ($condition) { }

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Exceptions and Throwables

The @ operator does not suppress Exceptions or Throwables. If an expression throws an exception, it will propagate normally and must be handled using a try...catch block. The operator strictly applies to traditional PHP errors triggered by the engine or via trigger_error().

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Retrieving Suppressed Errors

When an error is suppressed by the @ operator, the diagnostic message is not output or logged, but it is still recorded internally by the PHP engine. The suppressed error details can be programmatically retrieved immediately after the expression evaluates using the error_get_last() function. 
$value = @file_get_contents('non_existent_file.txt');

$error = error_get_last();
// If an error occurred, $error is an array containing 'type', 'message', 'file', and 'line'

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PHP 8.0+ Behavior Modification

The internal behavior of the @ operator changed significantly in PHP 8.0:
  • PHP 7.4 and older: The operator temporarily set the error_reporting level to 0. This suppressed all errors, including fatal errors (E_ERROR), which could cause scripts to terminate silently without writing to the error log.
  • PHP 8.0 and newer: The operator no longer suppresses fatal errors. It only suppresses non-fatal diagnostics. The error_reporting level is temporarily set to E_ERROR | E_CORE_ERROR | E_COMPILE_ERROR | E_USER_ERROR | E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR | E_PARSE. If a fatal error occurs within an @-prefixed expression, the script will halt and log the error normally.

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Interaction with Custom Error Handlers

Applying the @ operator does not bypass custom error handlers registered via set_error_handler(). The custom handler will still be invoked when an error occurs within the expression. To respect the @ operator within a custom handler, the handler must evaluate the current error_reporting() bitmask. The condition !(error_reporting() & $errno) will evaluate to true if the error level is excluded by the current bitmask—which happens either because it was temporarily suppressed by the @ operator, or because that specific error level was globally disabled via the error_reporting() configuration. 
set_error_handler(function($errno, $errstr) {
    // Check if the error level is excluded by the current error reporting bitmask
    // (Due to the @ operator OR global error_reporting configuration)
    if (!(error_reporting() & $errno)) {
        return false; // Silently ignore and continue execution
    }
    
    // Standard error handling logic here
});
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