Why is there a "@" in front of the functions in php

Question

In pset8, articles.php, why is there a "@" in front of some functions? for example,

$contents = @file_get_contents("http://news.google.com/news?geo={$geo}&output=rss", false, $context);

Thanks!

Answer 1

Per the documentation, the @ (known as the error control operator) does exactly that

PHP supports one error control operator: the at sign (@). When prepended to an expression in PHP, any error messages that might be generated by that expression will be ignored.