What tools or techniques can help identify errors in return values from PHP functions early in the development process?

One way to identify errors in return values from PHP functions early in the development process is to use type hinting. By specifying the expected return type of a function, PHP will throw a fatal error if the function returns a value of a different type. This can help catch errors before they propagate throughout the codebase. 

function divide(int $a, int $b): float {
    if ($b == 0) {
        throw new Exception("Division by zero");
    }
    
    return $a / $b;
}

// This will throw a fatal error since the function is expected to return a float
$result = divide(10, 3);

Keywords

debugging error handling PHP functions unit testing automated testing

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