PHP 7#

What happened to 6? It was a faied project due to the ropsed ntroduction of unicode

Most important feature#

Speed More requests a second, less memory usage

Weak typed - does not require declaration of data type.

PHP 5 you were limited to class and array. It would not allow scalar types.

in PHP 7 scalar types were allowed:

It is non-strict. ie. If you pass a string into a function requiring a float the string will be converted as best it can. Eg. “1 week” becomes 1

strict types will throw a fatal error.

php 7 also allows return type declarations:

declare(strict_types=1);

function getTotal(float $a, float $b): int{
  return $a + $b;
}

In the above example a fatal error will be thrown. You have to cast to int first.

Handling fatal errors would not invoke the error handler and would stop the script. For production servers that causes white screen of death

Spaceship operator: <=>

Checks each component individually…

2 < 1 reutrn -1
2 = 1 return 0
2 > 1 return 1

If set or, returns left operand if not null, else returns right.

$name = $firstName ?? "Guest";

//You can also stack - returns first not null

$name = $firstName ?? $MyName ?? "Guest";

Cryptographically secure sudo-random number generator - secure way of generating random data

Interface to operating systems random number generator

Usage passwords and password salts

random_bytes - return random bytes

random_int(1, 20) - return random integer

For emoji and international characters