What's new in PHP 7.3

Ian Littman / @iansltx

AustinPHP December 2018

https://ian.im/73aus18

PHP 7.3 is out!

Announcement / CHANGELOG / UPGRADING DOC

WARNING: PHP 7.0 is EOL, 5.6 at year-end

Upgrade if you haven't already

10% faster! (GC improvements)

BeOS support dropped

Windows file deletion

it works more posix-y now

Heredoc/Nowdoc Improvements

• You can now indent closing label, and the runtime will remove that level of indentation from all lines in the string (great for quoting SQL statements without looking weird!)
• You can now put things after the closing label on the same line
• WARNING: If you have heredocs that contain the closing label, fix them before upgrading!

End result: heredoc/nowdoc are just as useful and way less ugly.

references in list(), array destructuring

$arr = ['foo' => ['bar' => 'baz']];
['foo' => &$foo] = $arr;
$foo = ['baz' => 'qux'];
print_r($arr); // ['foo' => ['baz' => 'qux']];

proof on 3v4l

Other New Core(ish) Features

• You can now call instanceof on a literal (always false)
• CompileError (extends ParseError) handles a few things that used to fatal
• Trailing commas are now allowed in function/method calls (for cleaner diffs, similar to trailing commas in arrays)
• If linked against libargon2 >= 20161029, supports Argon2i/Argon2id password hash formats
• You can now tell json_decode() to throw if a decode fails (JSON_THROW_ON_ERROR)
• More syslog configs
• var_export() now does something useful with \stdClass

Other New Core(ish) Features #2

• debug_zval_dump() dedupe on recursive arrays
• array_push() + array_unshift() can be called with a single operator (useful when calling by unpacking an array)
• FPM now implements getallheaders()
• FILTER_VALIDATE_FLOAT supports specifying a thousands separator
• FILTER_SANITIZE_ADD_SLASHES replaces FILTER_SANITIZE_MAGIC_QUOTES
• PCRE now uses PCRE2 under the hood
• Can now pass an options array to setcookie() as 3rd param, as well as first param in session_set_cookie_params()

New functions!

• array_key_first(), array_key_last()
• hrtime() // high-resolution time
• is_countable()
• net_get_interfaces()
• fpm_get_status()
• DateTime::createFromImmutable()
• openssl_pkey_derive()
• Various GMP, intl, LDAP, socket methods

Extension features/improvements

• FPM logging improvements
  • Configurable line length
  • Fixes log line wrapping issues
  • Experimental logging without extra buffering
• LDAP extension now supports LDAP Controls
• MySQL now properly returns fractional seconds in times for both mysqli and PDO
• Passing through a bunch of cURL constants
• SimpleXML uses int or float when casting text to a math operation, rather than just using int all the time

BCMath improvements

• bcscale() now returns the current scale if called with no arguments
• Consistently uses PHP error handling now
• bcmul() and bcpow() no longer sometimes drop decimal zeroes

MBString improvements

• Full case-mapping and case-folding (may change string length)
• Unicode 11 support
• Strings > 2GB are now supported
• Much better performance, particularly for case conversions
• mb_ereg_* now supports named captures

Cleanup/BC Breaks

• See previous heredoc/nowdoc warning
• Warning when using "continue" in a switch (which behaves identically to "break")
• Numeric strings will no longer be cast to numbers when calling offsetGet on an object implementing ArrayAccess ($foo['123'] will now call offsetGet('123') rather than offsetGet(123) )
• If you were using assigning by reference to split static property assignment between parent and child classes, that no longer works
• Cleanup around references return by array/prop access
• You can't unpack arguments from a Traversable returning non-integer array keys

Cleanup/BC Breaks #2

• ext_skel is now (completely re)written in PHP
• Automatic conversion exceptions for e.g. DateTime no longer populate error_get_last()
• TypeError and Reflection now use "int" and "bool" rather than "integer" and "boolean"
• compact() on an undefined variable now genrates a Notice
• getimagesize() etc.: image/x-ms-bmp -> image/bmp
• stream_socket_get_name() now raps IPv6 addresses in []
• IMAP/POP3/NNTP SSH/RSH login turned off by default
• SPL's autoloader now stops on the first exception rather than trying to load everything and chaining exceptions

Deprecations

• Defining case-insensitive constants (via third param in define()); using constants case-insensitively is already deprecated
• Calling assert() inside a namespace (due to engine weirdness)
• Searching strings for a non-string (ASCII codepoint) needle
• Streaming strip-tags
• FILTER_FLAG_SCHEME_REQUIRED, FILTER_FLAG_HOST_REQUIRED (use FILTER_VALIDATE_URL)
• image2wbmp()
• Various mbstring aliases

thanks!