Book Image

PHP 8 Programming Tips, Tricks and Best Practices

By : Doug Bierer
Book Image

PHP 8 Programming Tips, Tricks and Best Practices

By: Doug Bierer

Overview of this book

Thanks to its ease of use, PHP is a highly popular programming language used on over 78% of all web servers connected to the Internet. PHP 8 Programming Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices will help you to get up-to-speed with PHP 8 quickly. The book is intended for any PHP developer who wants to become familiar with the cool new features available in PHP 8, and covers areas where developers might experience backward compatibility issues with their existing code after a PHP 8 update. The book thoroughly explores best practices, and highlights ways in which PHP 8 enforces these practices in a much more rigorous fashion than its earlier versions. You'll start by exploring new PHP 8 features in the area of object-oriented programming (OOP), followed by enhancements at the procedural level. You'll then learn about potential backward compatible breaks and discover best practices for improving performance. The last chapter of the book gives you insights into PHP async, a revolutionary new way of programming, by providing detailed coverage and examples of asynchronous programming using the Swoole extension and Fibers. By the end of this PHP book, you'll not only have mastered the new features, but you'll also know exactly what to watch out for when migrating older PHP applications to PHP 8.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: PHP 8 Tips
6
Section 2: PHP 8 Tricks
11
Section 3: PHP 8 Best Practices

Understanding PHP 8 string-to-numeric comparison improvements

Comparing two numeric values has never been an issue in PHP. A comparison between two strings is also not an issue. A problem arises in non-strict comparisons between strings and numeric data (hardcoded numbers, or variables containing data of the float or int type). In such cases, PHP will always convert the string to a numeric value if a non-strict comparison is executed.

The only time a string-to-numeric conversion is 100% successful is when the string only contains numbers (or numeric values such as plus, minus, or the decimal separator). In this section, you learn how to protect against inaccurate non-strict comparisons involving strings and numeric data. Mastering the concepts presented in this chapter is critical if you wish to produce code with consistent and predictable behavior.

Before we get into the details of string-to-numeric comparisons, we need to first gain an understanding of what is meant by a non...