Questions tagged [php-8]

PHP 8 is the current major version of php, released on 26 November 2020. It succeeded php-7.4, which was the last release of PHP 7. There is a migration guide to assist with upgrading, and a complete list of changes.

New features

• Named arguments in function signatures
• Union types and the mixed type in function signatures and property declarations
• A new match expression, similar to switch but which performs strict comparisons and evaluates to an expression
• Constructor property promotion for simplified class declarations
• New string functions str_starts_with(), str_ends_with(), and str_contains()
• catch statements do not require a capturing variable, and throw can now be used as an expression
• A new nullsafe operator for safe property access
• Attributes used in place of docblocks for structural information

See a high-level overview of new features, or a more complete list as part of the migration guide.

Removed features

These features were deprecated in previous releases and removed in PHP 8.0

• Old PHP 4-style constructors (methods with the same name as the class)
• The ability to call non-static methods statically
• The track_errors php.ini directive
• The __autoload() magic function
• The ability for the @ operator to silence fatal errors
• "Leading numeric" strings (i.e. 345 == "345abc" now evaluates to false)
• The use of the salt argument to password_hash()
• The create_function() function
• The each() function
• The read_exif_data() function
• The money_format() function
• The use of array_key_exists() with objects

A complete list of removals and other backwards-incompatible changes can be found as part of the migration guide.