PHP error debugging

[colombian]

I have been working with PHP for a while, but never gone through getting a good debugger - or debugging methodology.

 

Can someone send me links to suggestions and possibly good (free) software?

 

I am not hosting the website, so I cannot tell it to report all errors directly from the installation.

I tried

error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE);

on top of the page, but that does nothing. So it always takes a while for me to fix the errors.

 

Any help and hints appreciated (remember I cannot control the installation directly).

 

 

[frost]

So your host has disabled PHP from displaying errors onscreen?

 

If you are set up locally you could run your script on your own machine and debug it before uploading to your host?

 

 

[dbo]

I don't personally use it but IDE's such as Eclipse can be configured to use a debugger so that you can insert breakpoints and step through your code line by line.

 

The other alternative is to use echo statement's to trace where errors occur (even logic which default error messages won't usually tell you unless it breaks something). Sometime's it's helpful to do something like this echo "<script type='text/javascript'>alert($variable);</script>"; that way if your page redirects or something it's got to wait for you to say ok before moving forward and you'll be able to see  your variables.