PHP 8.4.0 RC4 available for testing

    New Features

    PHP Core

    Property Hooks

    Object properties may now have additional logic associated with their get and set operations. Depending on the usage, that may or may not make the property virtual, that is, it has no backing value at all.

    <?php
    class Person
    {
    // A "virtual" property. It may not be set explicitly.
    public string $fullName {
    get => $this->firstName . ' ' . $this->lastName;
    }

    // All write operations go through this hook, and the result is what is written.
    // Read access happens normally.
    public string $firstName {
    set => ucfirst(strtolower($value));
    }

    // All write operations go through this hook, which has to write to the backing value itself.
    // Read access happens normally.
    public string $lastName {
    set {
    if (    strlen($value) < 2) {
    throw new     \InvalidArgumentException('Too short');
    }
    $this->lastName = $value;
    }
    }
    }

    $p = new Person();

    $p->firstName = 'peter';
    print     $p->firstName; // Prints "Peter"
    $p->lastName = 'Peterson';
    print     $p->fullName; // Prints "Peter Peterson"

    Asymmetric Property Visibility

    Object properties may now have their set visibility controlled separately from the get visibility.

    <?php
    class Example
    {
    // The first visibility modifier controls the get-visibility, and the second modifier
    // controls the set-visibility. The get-visibility must not be narrower than set-visibility.
    public protected(set) string $name;

    public function     __construct(string $name)
    {
    $this->name = $name;
    }
    }

    Lazy Objects

    It is now possible to create objects whose initialization is deferred until they are accessed. Libraries and frameworks can leverage these lazy objects to defer fetching data or dependencies required for initialization.

    <?php
    class Example
    {
    public function     __construct(private int $data)
    {
    }

    // ...
    }

    $initializer = static function (Example $ghost): void {
    // Fetch data or dependencies
    $data = ...;
    // Initialize
    $ghost->__construct($data);
    };

    $reflector = new ReflectionClass(Example::class);
    $object = $reflector->newLazyGhost($initializer);

    #[\Deprecated] attribute

    The new Deprecated attribute can be used to mark functions, methods, and class constants as deprecated. The behavior of functionality deprecated with this attribute matches the behavior of the existing deprecation mechanism for functionality provided by PHP itself. The only exception is that the emitted error code is E_USER_DEPRECATED instead of E_DEPRECATED.

    Existing deprecations in functionality provided by PHP itself have been updated to use the attribute, improving the emitted error messages by including a short explanation.

    Parsing RFC1867 (multipart) requests in non-POST HTTP requests

    Added request_parse_body() function that allows parsing RFC1867 (multipart) requests in non-POST HTTP requests.

    Chaining new expressions without parentheses

    New expressions with constructor arguments are now dereferencable, meaning they allow chaining method calls, property accesses, etc. without enclosing the expression in parentheses.

    Improved Debugging Info for WeakReference

    Getting the debug info for WeakReference will now also output the object it references, or null if the reference is no longer valid.

    Improved Debugging Info for Closure

    The output of Closure::__debugInfo() now includes the name, file, and line of the Closure.

    Defining Identical Symbols in Different Namespace Blocks

    Exiting a namespace now clears seen symbols. This allows using a symbol in a namespace block, even if a previous namespace block declared a symbol with the same name.

    cURL

    curl_version() returns an additional feature_list value, which is an associative array of all known cURL features, and whether they are supported (true) or not (false).

    Added CURL_HTTP_VERSION_3 and CURL_HTTP_VERSION_3ONLY constants (available since libcurl 7.66 and 7.88) as available options for CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION.

    Added CURLOPT_PREREQFUNCTION as a cURL option that accepts a callable to be called after the connection is made, but before the request is sent. This callable must return either CURL_PREREQFUNC_OK or CURL_PREREQFUNC_ABORT to allow or abort the request.

    Added CURLOPT_SERVER_RESPONSE_TIMEOUT, which was formerly known as CURLOPT_FTP_RESPONSE_TIMEOUT. Both constants hold the same value.

    Added CURLOPT_DEBUGFUNCTION as a cURL option that accepts a callable that gets called during the request lifetime with the CurlHandle object, an integer containing the debug message type, and a string containing the debug message. The debug message type is one of the following constants:

    • CURLINFO_TEXT
    • CURLINFO_HEADER_IN
    • CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT
    • CURLINFO_DATA_IN
    • CURLINFO_DATA_OUT
    • CURLINFO_SSL_DATA_IN
    • CURLINFO_SSL_DATA_OUT
    Once this option is set, CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT must not be set because it uses the same libcurl functionality.

    The curl_getinfo() now returns an additional posttransfer_time_us key, containing the number of microseconds from the start until the last byte is sent. When a redirect is followed, the time from each request is added together. This value can also be retrieved by passing CURLINFO_POSTTRANSFER_TIME_T to the curl_getinfo() option parameter. This requires libcurl 8.10.0 or later.

    DOM

    Added the Dom namespace with new classes as counterparts to the existing DOM classes (e.g. Dom\Node is the new DOMNode). These classes are compatible with HTML 5 and are WHATWG spec-compliant; solving long-standing bugs in the DOM extension. The old DOM classes remain available for backwards compatibility.

    Added the DOMNode::compareDocumentPosition() with its associated constants:

    • DOMNode::DOCUMENT_POSITION_DISCONNECTED
    • DOMNode::DOCUMENT_POSITION_PRECEDING
    • DOMNode::DOCUMENT_POSITION_FOLLOWING
    • DOMNode::DOCUMENT_POSITION_CONTAINS
    • DOMNode::DOCUMENT_POSITION_CONTAINED_BY
    • DOMNode::DOCUMENT_POSITION_IMPLEMENTATION_SPECIFIC

    It is now possible to pass any callable to DOMXPath::registerPhpFunctions(). Furthermore, with DOMXPath::registerPhpFunctionNs(), callbacks can now be registered that will use native function call syntax rather than using php:function('name').

    Intl

    Added the NumberFormatter::ROUND_HALFODD to complement the existing NumberFormatter::ROUND_HALFEVEN functionality.

    OpenSSL

    Added support for Curve25519 + Curve448 based keys. Specifically x25519, ed25519, x448 and ed448 fields are supported in openssl_pkey_new(), openssl_pkey_get_details(), openssl_sign(), and openssl_verify() were extended to support those keys.

    Implement PASSWORD_ARGON2 password hashing. Requires OpenSSL 3.2 and NTS build.

    PCRE

    The bundled pcre2lib has been updated to version 10.44. As a consequence, LoongArch JIT support has been added, spaces are now allowed between braces in Perl-compatible items, and variable-length lookbehind assertions are now supported.

    With pcre2lib version 10.44, the maximum length of named capture groups has changed from 32 to 128.

    Added support for the r (PCRE2_EXTRA_CASELESS_RESTRICT) modifier, as well as the (?r) mode modifier. When enabled along with the case-insensitive modifier (i), the expression locks out mixing of ASCII and non-ASCII characters.

    PDO

    Added support for driver-specific subclasses. This RFC adds subclasses for PDO in order to better support database-specific functionalities. The new classes are instantiatable either via calling the PDO::connect() method or by instantiating an instance of the driver-specific subclass directly.

    Added support for driver specific SQL parsers. The default parser supports:

    • single and double-quoted literals, with doubling as escaping mechanism
    • two-dashes and non-nested C-style comments

    PDO_MYSQL

    Added a custom parser supporting:

    • single and double-quoted literals, with doubling and backslash as escaping mechanism
    • backtick literal identifiers and with doubling as escaping mechanism
    • two dashes followed by at least 1 whitespace, non-nested C-style comments, and hash-comments

    PDO_PGSQL

    Added a custom parser supporting:

    • single and double-quoted literals, with doubling as escaping mechanism
    • C-style "escape" string literals (E'string')
    • dollar-quoted string literals
    • two-dashes and C-style comments (non-nested)
    • support for ?? as escape sequence for the ? operator

    PDO_SQLITE

    Added a custom parser supporting:

    • single, double-quoted, and backtick literals, with doubling as escaping mechanism
    • square brackets quoting for identifiers
    • two-dashes and C-style comments (non-nested)

    Phar

    Added support for the Unix timestamp extension for Zip archives.

    Readline

    Added ability to change the .php_history path through the PHP_HISTFILE environment variable.

    SOAP

    Added support for clark notation for namespaces in class map. It is now possible to specify entries in a class map with clark notation to resolve a type with a specific namespace to a specific class. For example: '{http://example.com}foo' => 'FooClass'.

    Instances of DateTimeInterface that are passed to xsd:datetime or similar elements are now serialized as such instead of being serialized as an empty string.

    Session persistence now works with a shared session module.

    Standard

    Added a new RoundingMode enum with clearer naming and improved discoverability compared to the PHP_ROUND_* constants. Moreover, four new rounding modes were added which are only available via the new RoundingMode enum.

    XSL

    It is now possible to use parameters that contain both single and double quotes.

    It is now possible to pass any callable to XSLTProcessor::registerPhpFunctions().

    Added XSLTProcessor::$maxTemplateDepth and XSLTProcessor::$maxTemplateVars to control the recursion depth of XSL template evaluation.

    Zip

    Added the ZipArchive::ER_TRUNCATED_ZIP constant, which was added in libzip 1.11.

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