There are 4 types of errors and warnings in PHP. They are:
1 - Normal Function Errors
2 - Normal Warnings
4 - Parser Errors
8 - Notices (warnings you can ignore but which may imply a bug in your code)
The above 4 numbers are added up to define an error reporting level. The default error reporting level is 7 which is 1 + 2 + 4, or everything except notices. This level can be changed in the php3.ini file with the error_reporting directive. It can also be set in your Apache httpd.conf file with the php3_error_reporting directive or lastly it may be set at runtime within a script using the error_reporting() function.
All PHP expressions can also be called with the "@" prefix, which turns off error reporting for that particular expression. If an error occurred during such an expression and the track_errors feature is enabled, you can find the error message in the global variable $php_errormsg.