title: organizing technical and user-facing error messages in php
body: <p>I'm having a little trouble organizing my error messages for two interacting classes. One object has states that are 'error-ish', where something went wrong, or happened unexpectedly, but the situation is still salvageable. I don't want to use exceptions, 1. because they only have a single string for the message, and 2. because I want to access the object after the error. At the very least, I want to use some of its get() methods to construct a useful error message after the exception!</p>
  
  <p>Ultimately I have two messages I want to communicate: one to myself as the coder, that something went wrong. This string would have the technical details of the file, line, function/method, arguments, and results. Obviously, I don't want to show this to the user, so there is another string of an error message that I want to show the user ("That email address was not found" kind of thing ). </p>
  
  <p>So the thought occurs to me to build an error message array, which could use the error code from exceptions, or a status code, as keys for various messages. ( Though if I do this, where do I store the array of messages? ) Another option might be to make an error status object.</p>
  
  <p>Is there anything like "error patterns", similar to design patterns?</p>