Is there a way to...

[Shining Arcanine]

... detect if the DB is up or down without the PHP Intrepreter printing an error?

I decided to recode my site from scratch with a MySQL backend. However, I want parts of the site to be able to run off flat files when the DB is down. I know how to get it to run off flat files but I don't know how to detect if MySQL is running or not without PHP giving an error.

[merk]

in htaccess you could put

php_flag display_errors off

This should be used on any production website, it adds a touch more security (should an error crop up) with register_globals off.

Or, you could use the @ operator before the connection command.

@mysql_connect(blah); 

Im not sure if the @ works for every command though.

Maybe even error_reporting

error_reporting(0); 

[megahard]

yea could use

if( !mysql_connect(db, username, password) ){
// user flat files
}

[Shining Arcanine]

Cool, thanks.

[Matty Bwoy]

Off the top of my head, you could do:

mysql_connect(db, username, password) or die ("Your own error message");

[qxh]

All of these suggestions should work fine, however the last 2 seem the best.

[merk]

My suggestions were not to see what was going on, just to supress the PHP warnings

[Shining Arcanine]

When the DB is offline, PHP gives a warning. I was trying to detect if the DB was offline so I didn't want PHP to give me a warning.

Anyway, I got it to work by using @. Thankyou for your help.