Keith Devens .com

PHP sucks yet again

Via Jeff, just found these PHP Developers' Meeting minutes on PHP 6. Call-time pass-by-reference was deprecated for no reason somewhere along the line. Now they're un-deprecating it, changing it back from an E_WARNING (they claim it's E_NOTICE, but it's not) to just E_STRICT (though they're also turning E_STRICT on by default):

The first issue that we raised was changing the E_NOTICE error for call-time-pass-by-reference to an E_ERROR, or simply throwing a parse error. We argued over this case and we decided to change this E_NOTICE to an E_STRICT instead as it was argued that there is nothing wrong with doing a call-time pass by reference.

Argh! I vented my frutration about this feature being deprecated since it broke some of PHP's built-in functionality. Now it's just "Sorry, there really was no reason for us to deprecate that feature. Our bad".

On the bright side, it looks like they're removing magic quotes and register globals.

Also, the PHP people couldn't agree on how to fix a sore spot in the language if you develop with notices on. You commonly have to do things like the following:


<?php
$foo = isset($_REQUEST['foo']) ? $_REQUEST['foo'] : NULL;
?>

so that you don't get an error if $_REQUEST['foo'] doesn't exist. Obviously that's really cumbersome to do over and over again. They proposed adding an ifsetor function that does essentially the following:


<?php
function ifsetor($var, $default){
    return isset($var) ? $var : $default;
}
?>

But note the special casing in their example:


<?php
$foo = ifsetor($_GET['foo'], 42);
?>

That's not allowed if $_GET['foo'] doesn't already exist; if I call my version of ifsetor I get a NOTICE error. So, they'd add a special case in the language (just like they already have with isset) to make it appear as if $_GET['foo'] returns NULL if it's not defined. But if that was the case it would defeat the whole purpose of the feature anyway!

However, they decided against ifsetor and instead are adding a syntax extension that lets you elide the middle value for the ternary operator for the common case as shown above, which would allow:


<?php
$foo = $_REQUEST['foo'] ?: NULL;
?>

Which really isn't bad at all. Only:

Instead of implementing ifsetor() we remove the requirement for the "middle" parameter to the ?: operator. The middle parameter then defaults to the first one. If the first parameter is not set, then we will still throw an E_NOTICE.

So, again the feature becomes useless for the common case I've been talking about. However, they've provided the following for me:


<?php
$foo = input_filter_get(GET, 'foo', FL_INT) ?: 42;
?>

Great.

FYI, I have a few convenience functions just for these common cases:


<?php
function g(&$var, $key, $default = NULL){ #make it easy to develop with notices on
    return isset($var[$key]) ? $var[$key] : $default;
}
function r($key){ return g($_REQUEST, $key); }
?>

g optionally does some more than that, but that's the base case.

Now, this I'm very happy about. They're getting rid of the `{}` indexing for strings (which they admit was a hack to simplify their parser) and allowing slicing notation like Python does. That's excellent. They k'd on named parameters, however.

Note: any emphasis in any quote above is my own.

Permalink | 7 Comments | Tags: PHP, Programming | id 7629

13:47 (utc-5)
edited: 14:34 (utc-5)

Here's the whole g function, for your entertainment (update, Dec 7: fixed bug in g):


<?php
function g(&$var, $key, $default = NULL){ #make it easy to develop with notices on
    if(!is_array($key)){
        return isset($var[$key]) ? $var[$key] : $default;
    }else{
        $result = array();
        if(isset($key[0])) #numeric
            foreach($key as $k)
                $result[] = g($var, $k);
        else #associative
            foreach($key as $k=>$v)
                $result[$v] = g($var, $k);

        return $result;
    }
}
?>

So, if $key is an array you get an array back composed only of the keys you specify in the array, where keys that don't exist get NULL. And if you specify an associative array you can transform the keys in an array from the keys in that array to the corresponding values.

I also use this function everywhere:


<?php
function e($str){ echo htmlspecialchars($str); }
?>

It's way easier to type e($foo) than echo htmlspecialchars($foo) all over the place. I have a lot of these little functions I use everywhere on my PHP page, if you're interested.

Thursday, November 24, 2005

PHP sucks yet again

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