Trapping PostgreSQL error messages

Hi there,

This may be a really basic question to those who have more programming
experience than I do, but I was wondering if there's any good way to trap
PostgreSQL error messages so that they're logged to a file, but a site user
doesn't see them and gets a more user-friendly error message instead.

I have a few standard things in there like "or die" with a custom error
message in brackets after pg_query statements, but what that seems to
generate is the regular messy PostgreSQL error messages *plus* whatever I
put in for the die message, rather than my message being displayed *instead*
of the ones the server generates. Is there a way of changing this so that I
can provide a friendlier error message and keep the more detailed ones
logged somewhere for my own viewing?

Searching the web, I did find this:
http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/plpgsql-control-structures.htm
l#PLPGSQL-ERROR-TRAPPING
But found it a bit confusing, probably because I'm not all that certain what
PL/pgSQL is, or if/how you could apply this in practice on a PHP-based site.
Could the exception statements they're using there be used to generate
custom error messages? Would the original PostgreSQL error message with all
detail still be recorded somewhere?

Is there a more detailed (and/or comprehensible to a not-so-experienced
programmer) explanation of this somewhere?

Lynna

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