[Xapian-discuss] PHP Fatal error while indexing Wikipedia

[Robert Young]

On Jan 2, 2008 12:22 AM, Olly Betts <olly at survex.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 01, 2008 at 11:50:35PM +0000, Robert Young wrote:
> > > Which xapian-bindings version is this?  Line 1482 doesn't seem to match
> > > up with my tree.
> > 1.0.4
> > The function is
> >   function index_text($text,$weight=1,$prefix=null) {
> >     switch (func_num_args()) {
> >     case 1: case 2:
> > TermGenerator_index_text($this->_cPtr,$text,$weight); break; // <--
> > line 1482
> >     default: TermGenerator_index_text($this->_cPtr,$text,$weight,$prefix);
> >     }
> >   }
> >
> > > It sounds like either you're passing in parameters with the wrong type,
> > > or it's a bug in the wrappers SWIG is generating, but it's hard to know
> > > which without seeing your indexer code.  The generated code looks OK to
> > > me at least.
> > >
> > > My best guess is that maybe you are passing a string for the weight
> > > parameter in some case - as the documentation says:
> >
> > As you can see from the code above, it doesn't look like it can be
> > getting anything other than 1 or 2 for the weight.
>
> I think you must be misreading the code - the switch is on
> "func_num_args()", which in PHP returns the number of parameters which
> were passed to the current function/method.  So $weight is either 1 or
> whatever was passed to the index_text method.
Ooops! Sorry, yes, hrm... I'll put that down to a late night response.
What I should have noticed however, is that I'm only passing one
parameter into index_text anyway.

> > >     One thing to be aware of though is that SWIG implements dispatch
> > >     functions for overloaded methods based on the types of the
> > >     parameters, so you can't always pass in a string containing a number
> > >     (e.g. "42") where a number is expected as you usually can in PHP.
> > >     You need to explicitly convert to the type required - e.g. use (int)
> > >     to convert to an integer, (string) to string, (double) to a floating
> > >     point number.
> > Ahh, that may be something. If the field value is empty it may be null
> > rather than an empty string. I guess I shouldn't be indexing it either
> > way really. I won't get another chance to run this until tomorrow but
> > I'll let you know how it goes. Thanks for the pointer.
>
> That sounds plausible.
>
> It would be nice to give a better error for such cases, but it's not
> easily to do because the handling code is generated by SWIG from the
> parameter lists of the overloaded forms of the function or method.
I was going to ask actually, is it possible to configure SWIG to throw
exceptions rather than fatal errors in PHP5+? The main problem is that
PHP fatal errors cannot be caught and cannot even be handled by custom
error handling so they're very difficult to debug.

Cheers
Rob