Hidden Features of PHP? [closed]

Answer 1

I'm a bit like you, I've coded PHP for over 8 years. I had to take a .NET/C# course about a year ago and I really enjoyed the C# language (hated ASP.NET) but it made me a better PHP developer.

PHP as a language is pretty poor, but, I'm extremely quick with it and the LAMP stack is awesome. The end product far outweighs the sum of the parts.

That said, in answer to your question:

http://uk.php.net/SPL

I love the SPL, the collection class in C# was something that I liked as soon as I started with it. Now I can have my cake and eat it.

Andrew

Answer 2

You can take advantage of the fact that the or operator has lower precedence than = to do this:

$page = (int) @$_GET['page'] 
  or $page = 1;

If the value of the first assignment evaluates to true, the second assignment is ignored. Another example:

$record = get_record($id) 
  or throw new Exception("...");

Answer 3

One not so well known feature of PHP is extract(), a function that unpacks an associative array into the local namespace. This probably exists for the autoglobal abormination but is very useful for templating:

function render_template($template_name, $context, $as_string=false)
{
    extract($context);
    if ($as_string)
        ob_start();
    include TEMPLATE_DIR . '/' . $template_name;
    if ($as_string)
        return ob_get_clean();
}

Now you can use render_template('index.html', array('foo' => 'bar')) and only $foo with the value "bar" appears in the template.

Answer 4

Here's one, I like how setting default values on function parameters that aren't supplied is much easier:

function MyMethod($VarICareAbout, $VarIDontCareAbout = 'yippie') { }

Answer 5

The standard class is a neat container. I only learned about it recently.

Instead of using an array to hold serveral attributes

$person = array();
$person['name'] = 'bob';
$person['age'] = 5;

You can use a standard class

$person = new stdClass();
$person->name = 'bob';
$person->age = 5;

This is particularly helpful when accessing these variables in a string

$string = $person['name'] . ' is ' . $person['age'] . ' years old.';
// vs
$string = "$person->name is $person->age years old.";

Answer 6

Range() isn't hidden per se, but I still see a lot of people iterating with:

for ($i=0; $i < $x; $i++) { 
    // code...
}

when they could be using:

foreach (range(0, 12) as $number) {
    // ...
}

And you can do simple things like

foreach (range(date("Y"), date("Y")+20) as $i)
{
print "\t<option value=\"{$i}\">{$i}</option>\n";
}