Integration with Xdebug to improve error handler

[ejunker]

It seems whoops is focusing more on exception handling than error handling. I am currently using Xdebug and the HTML stacktraces. http://xdebug.org/docs/stack_trace I'm wondering if the whoops error handler could be improved by integrating with Xdebug.

For example, using this example code:

<?php
require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

$run = new Whoops\Run;
$handler = new Whoops\Handler\PrettyPageHandler;
$run->pushHandler($handler);
$run->register();

bar();

Whoops doesn't show me the line number where the error occurred or a stacktrace. If I use xdebug's error messages I do get line numbers and a stacktrace.

Edit: After looking into it, you can get the backtrace without using Xdebug. I made some progress by adding this code to getFrames() in Inspector.php

if ($this->exception instanceof ErrorException) {
    $frames = debug_backtrace();
}

[stijnj]

+1 on this. Would really improve error handling.

An other option is to improve extensibility of Inspector by adding a protected setter for frames attribute so we're allowed to set our own frames from Xdebug.

[Rarst]

+1 some frameworks are error- rather than exception-centric (*cough* WordPress) and it would be very nice to have backtrace for errors (even native PHP one for starters, without xdebug extras).

update hm, I got first impression it's not showing backtraces for errors in general, but sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.

[denis-sokolov]

Also xdebug has potentially powerful features, such as collect_params.

[denis-sokolov]

We do not get a backtrace for PHP fatal errors, this is a PHP limitation.

Using Xdebug would allow us to workaround this limitation, as well as use other features, as the mentioned collect_params.

I have added this feature request on our list of possible features to add.