PHP 8.5 Released

[Weedpacket]

https://www.php.net/releases/8.5/en.php

There are half a dozen significant new features in this release.

URI Extension
For working with URIs and URLs in standards-compliant ways

Clone With
When cloning an object, you might want to make changes along the way to the clone. Instead of cloning the object and then going through and making the changes, you can do both in one step.

\NoDiscard Attribute
For some functions, throwing away the return value can be a sign you're Doing It Wrong™. With this attribute in place, you'll be told you're doing that. If you really did want to discard it, a (void) cast overrides the message.

Closures in constant expressions
As well as scalar types and arrays, you can now use closures and first-class callables where "constant expressions" are required.

Pipe Operator
Instead of chaining function calls together and then having to read them from the inside out to find out what is happening, you can build a pipeline and have the return value of each passed as an argument to the next.

The migration guide is in the expected place: https://php.net/manual/en/migration85.php

[Weedpacket]

Pipe Operator

This is actually part of an ongoing sequence of syntax improvements that started back with $a = foo(...); for creating closures. There is more to come in this area.

Back in the day, I inflicted something like

	$file = array_map(fn($line) => explode(' ', $line), array_values(
		array_filter(
			array_map(trim(...),
				preg_split('/\b0\b/',
					join(' ',
						array_map(collapse_space(...),
							array_map(trim(...),
								preg_grep('/^\s*-?\d+(\s+-?\d+)*\s*$/',
									preg_grep('/^[a-z]/',
										file($filename),
										PREG_GREP_INVERT))))),
					flags: PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY)),
			strlen(...))));

on you all. Notice how far some of the arguments end up from the function call they're actually part of.
With the pipe operator that becomes

$file = file($filename)
	|> (fn($ls) => preg_grep('/^[a-z]/', $ls, PREG_GREP_INVERT))
	|> (fn($ls) => preg_grep('/^\s*-?\d+(\s+-?\d+)*\s*$/', $ls))
	|> (fn($ls) => array_map(trim(...), $ls))
	|> (fn($ls) => array_map(collapse_space(...), $ls))
	|> (fn($ls) => join(' ', $ls))
	|> (fn($ls) => preg_split('/\b0\b/', $ls, flags: PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY))
	|> (fn($ls) => array_map(trim(...), $ls))
	|> (fn($ls) => array_filter($ls, strlen(...)))
	|> array_values(...)
	|> (fn($ls) => array_map(fn($line) => explode(' ', $line)));

Which is definitely easier to follow. Still a bit verbose, but like I say the syntax changes are a work in progress.

[JohanFahey]

Thanks for the link