Hidden Features of PHP? [closed]

Answer 1

The static keyword is useful outside of a OOP standpoint. You can quickly and easily implement 'memoization' or function caching with something as simple as:

<?php
function foo($arg1)
{
    static $cache;

    if( !isset($cache[md5($arg1)]) )
    {
        // Do the work here
        $cache[md5($arg1)] = $results;
    }

    return $cache[md5($arg1)];
}
?>

The static keyword creates a variable that persists only within the scope of that function past the execution. This technique is great for functions that hit the database like get_all_books_by_id(...) or get_all_categories(...) that you would call more than once during a page load.

Caveat: Make sure you find out the best way to make a key for your hash, in just about every circumstance the md5(...) above is NOT a good decision (speed and output length issues), I used it for illustrative purposes. sprintf('%u', crc32(...)) or spl_object_hash(...) may be much better depending on the context.

Answer 2

The single most useful thing about PHP code is that if I don't quite understand a function I see I can look it up by using a browser and typing:

http://php.net/function

Last month I saw the "range" function in some code. It's one of the hundreds of functions I'd managed to never use but turn out to be really useful:

http://php.net/range

That url is an alias for http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.range.php. That simple idea, of mapping functions and keywords to urls, is awesome.

I wish other languages, frameworks, databases, operating systems has as simple a mechanism for looking up documentation.

Answer 3

You can use functions with a undefined number of arguments using the func_get_args().

<?php

function test() {

    $args = func_get_args();
    echo $args[2]; // will print 'd'
    echo $args[1]; // will print 3
}

test(1,3,'d',4);

?>

Answer 4

You can use minus character in variable names like this:

class style
{
  ....
  function set_bg_colour($c)
  {
    $this->{'background-color'} = $c;
  }
}

Why use it? No idea: maybe for a CSS model? Or some weird JSON you need to output. It's an odd feature :)

Answer 5

HEREDOC syntax is my favourite hidden feature. Always difficult to find as you can't Google for <<< but it stops you having to escape large chunks of HTML and still allows you to drop variables into the stream.

echo <<<EOM
  <div id="someblock">
    <img src="{$file}" />
  </div>
EOM;

Answer 6

Probably not many know that it is possible to specify constant "variables" as default values for function parameters:

function myFunc($param1, $param2 = MY_CONST)
{
//code...
}

Strings can be used as if they were arrays:

$str = 'hell o World';
echo $str; //outputs: "hell o World"

$str[0] = 'H';
echo $str; //outputs: "Hell o World"

$str[4] = null;
echo $str; //outputs: "Hello World"