PHP: Other Changes

Core changes

The iterable type is now a built-in compile time alias for array|Traversable. Error messages relating to iterable will therefore now use array|Traversable. Type Reflection is preserved for single iterable (and ?iterable) to produce a ReflectionNamedType with name iterable, however usage of iterable in union types will be converted to array|Traversable.

The date format of sent cookies is now 'D, d M Y H:i:s \G\M\T'; previously it was 'D, d-M-Y H:i:s T'.

Changes in SAPI Modules

CLI

The STDOUT, STDERR and STDIN streams are no longer closed on resource destruction which is mostly when the CLI finishes. It is however still possible to explicitly close those streams using fclose() and similar.

Changed Functions

Core

The strcmp(), strcasecmp(), strncmp(), strncasecmp(), and substr_compare() functions, using binary safe string comparison now return -1, 0 and 1.

DBA

dba_open() and dba_popen() now have the following enforced signature:

dba_open(
    string $path,
    string $mode,
    ?string $handler = null,
    int $permission = 0644,
    int $map_size = 0,
    ?int $flags = null
): resource|false

dba_fetch()'s optional skip argument is now at the end in line with PHP userland semantics. Its signature is now:

dba_fetch(string|array $key, resource $handle, int $skip): string|false

The overloaded signature:

dba_fetch(string|array $key, int $skip, resource $handle): string|false

is still accepted, but it is recommended to use the new standard variant.

Random

random_bytes() and random_int() now throw a \Random\RandomException on CSPRNG failures. Previously a plain \Exception was thrown instead.

SPL

The iterator parameter of iterator_to_array() and iterator_count() is widened to iterable from Iterator, allowing arrays to be passed.

Other Changes to Extensions

Date

The properties of DatePeriod are now properly declared.

Intl

Instances of IntlBreakIterator, IntlRuleBasedBreakIterator, IntlCodePointBreakIterator, IntlPartsIterator, IntlCalendar, Collator, IntlIterator, UConverter, IntlDateFormatter, IntlDatePatternGenerator, MessageFormatter, ResourceBundle, Spoofchecker, IntlTimeZone, and Transliterator are no longer serializable. Previously, they could be serialized, but unserialization yielded unusable objects or failed.

MySQLi

The support for libmysql has been removed and it is no longer possible to compile mysqli with libmysql. From now on, the mysqli extension can be compiled only with mysqlnd. All libmysql features unavailable in mysqlnd have been removed:

The reconnect property of mysqli_driver
The mysqli.reconnect INI directive
The MYSQLI_IS_MARIADB constant has been deprecated

OCI8

The minimum Oracle Client library version required is now 11.2.

PCRE

NUL characters (\0) in pattern strings are now supported.

Session

Trying to change the session.cookie_samesite INI directive while the session is active or output has already been sent will now fail and emit a warning. This aligns the behaviour with all other session INI settings.

SQLite3

sqlite3.defensive is now INI_USER.

Standard

getimagesize() now reports the actual image dimensions, bits and channels of AVIF images. Previously, the dimensions have been reported as 0x0, and bits and channels have not been reported at all.

Tidy

The properties of the tidy class are now properly declared. And those of the tidyNode class are now properly declared as readonly.

Zip

The Zip extension has been updated to version 1.20.0, which adds the following methods:

Changes to INI File Handling

Support for binary (0b/0B) and octal (0o/0O) prefixes has been added to integer INI settings. Integer INI settings that start with a zero (0) continue to be interpreted as an octal integer.

Parsing of some ill-formatted values will now trigger a warning when this was silently ignored before. For backwards compatibility, interpretation of these values has not changed. This affects the following settings:

Other Changes