Book Image

PHP 7 Programming Cookbook

By : Doug Bierer
Book Image

PHP 7 Programming Cookbook

By: Doug Bierer

Overview of this book

PHP 7 comes with a myriad of new features and great tools to optimize your code and make your code perform faster than in previous versions. Most importantly, it allows you to maintain high traffic on your websites with low-cost hardware and servers through a multithreading web server. This book demonstrates intermediate to advanced PHP techniques with a focus on PHP 7. Each recipe is designed to solve practical, real-world problems faced by PHP developers like yourself every day. We also cover new ways of writing PHP code made possible only in version 7. In addition, we discuss backward-compatibility breaks and give you plenty of guidance on when and where PHP 5 code needs to be changed to produce the correct results when running under PHP 7. This book also incorporates the latest PHP 7.x features. By the end of the book, you will be equipped with the tools and skills required to deliver efficient applications for your websites and enterprises.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
PHP 7 Programming Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using return value data typing


PHP 7 allows you to specify a data type for the return value of a function. Unlike scalar type hinting, however, you don't need to add any special declarations.

How to do it...

  1. This example shows you how to assign a data type to a function return value. To assign a return data type, first define the function as you would normally. After the closing parenthesis, add a space, followed by the data type and a colon:

    function returnsString(DateTime $date, $format) : string
    {
      return $date->format($format);
    }

    Note

    PHP 7.1 introduced a variation on return data typing called nullable types. All you need to do is to change string to ?string. This allows the function to return either string or NULL.

  2. Anything returned by the function, regardless of its data type inside the function, will be converted to the declared data type as a return value. Notice, in this example, the values of $a, $b, and $c are added together to produce a single sum, which is returned. Normally you...