Call to a member function errorInfo() on string - php

Question

I'm running through a tutorial where it uses MySQLi but instead I'm using PDO and I have been trying to pin the issue to why I am getting this error:
Fatal error: Call to a member function errorInfo() on string in D:\Program Files (x86)\xampp\htdocs\repos\bla\web\inboxPage.php on line 34
Here is where I am trying to call the errorInfo(), I had previously used mysql_error(); as per tutorial, but this also threw the same error. Before using errorInfo() I was looking around to see if there was a PDO equivelant to mysql_error() which lead me to what you see below - Me thinking it would work. But it didn't.
Tutorials example:
$query = "SELECT id, sender, subject, message FROM messages WHERE reciever='$user'";
$sqlinbox = mysql_query($query);
if(!$sqlinbox)
{
?>
<p><?php print '$query: '.$query.mysql_error();?></p>
<?php
}
My Example:
$sql = 'SELECT id, Sender, Subject, Message FROM privatemessages WHERE Receiver = :receiver';
$stmt = $conn->prepare($sql);
$stmt->bindParam(':receiver', $user);
$stmt->execute();
$result = $stmt->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
if (!$result){
?>
<p><?php print '$sql: '.$sql.errorInfo(); ?></p>
<?php
}
Here is my connection to the database:
$servername = 'localhost';
$user = 'root';
$pass = '';
$database = 'tutor_database';
try {
$conn = new PDO("mysql:host=$servername;dbname=$database", $user, $pass);
$conn->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
}
catch (PDOException $e){
echo "Connection failed: " . $e->getMessage();
}
In addition, I did try the first example from the PHP Manual website -> http://php.net/manual/en/pdostatement.errorinfo.php and found that doing so gave me:
PDO::errorInfo():
Notice: Array to string conversion in D:\Program Files (x86)\xampp\htdocs\repos\bla\web\inboxPage.php on line 37
$sql: Array
...instead.
Would appreciate some help on this as I'm clearly failing to see what is happening. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

In PDO a completely different method for the error reporting have to be used. In short, PDO will report its errors already, without the need to write any code.
So just take out the error reporting part, leaving only
$sql = 'SELECT id, Sender, Subject, Message FROM privatemessages WHERE Receiver = :receiver';
$stmt = $conn->prepare($sql);
$stmt->bindParam(':receiver', $user);
$stmt->execute();
$result = $stmt->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
that's all you need.