PHP8 (Migrating existing PHP7 project to PHP8)

February 5, 2021

Ramatou Adamou Issa

PHP8 (Migrating existing PHP7 project to PHP8)

The latest PHP version is released on November 26, 2020. This version comes with a lot of new features and improvements. In this article, I will implement some of these new features in an existing PHP project.

Project Link

You can download the code source from this github link

Implemented PHP8 features

  1. PHP8 match expression, RFC

Php8 comes with a new expression match that replaces switch in the older versions. match expression has a lot of advantages compared to traditional PHP switch cases. Some of those advantages are

  • match expression offer shorter code block
  • it does not require break
  • there is no type coercion

Code implementation

Here, in this code, the ship parameter is passed through the createForm The ship object type is instantiated depending on this parameter.

  • Older PHP version
    public function createFromData(array $data): ?AbstractShip
    {     
        switch ($data['team']) {
            case 'empire':
                $ship = (new Ship())
                    ->setJediFactor($data['jedi_factor']);
                break;
            case 'rebel':
                $ship = new RebelShip();
                break;
            case 'broken':
                $ship = new BrokenShip();
                break;
            case 'bounty hunter':
                $ship = new BountyHunterShip();
                break;
            default:
                $ship = (new Ship())
                    ->setJediFactor($data['jedi_factor']);

        }   
    }
  • What we got with PHP8 match
     public function createFromData(array $data): ?AbstractShip
    {
        if (!isset($data['team'])) {
            return null;
        }

        $ship = match ($data['team']) {
            'rebel' => new RebelShip(),
            'broken' => new BrokenShip(),
            'bounty hunter' => new BountyHunterShip(),
             default => (new Ship())->setJediFactor($data['jedi_factor'])
        };
     
    }

  1. Constructor properties promotion, see RFC

As in Javascript, PHP8 introduces the use of syntactic sugar to define class constructor. Below is the new implementation.

Code implementation

  • Before
   private $jsonFixturesLoader;

    public function __construct(LoaderInterface $jsonFixturesLoader)
    {
        $this->jsonFixturesLoader = $jsonFixturesLoader;
    }
  • After
      public function __construct(
        private LoaderInterface $jsonFixturesLoader
    ){}

  1. Named arguments

It is now totally possible to name an argument passed to a function or method call.

Code implementation

  • Before
    $battleResult = $battleManager->battle(
    $ship1,
    $ship1Quantity,
    $ship2,
    $ship2Quantity,
    $battleType
);
  • After
$battleResult = $battleManager->battle(
        ship1: $ship1,
        ship1Quantity: $ship1Quantity,
        ship2: $ship2,
        ship2Quantity: $ship2Quantity,
        battleType: $battleType
);

  1. Non-capturing catches

In PHP8, whenever you wanted to catch an exception, you can omit the catch exception variable

Code Implementation

  • Before
     try {
            $jsonContents = \Safe\file_get_contents($this->filename);

            return \Safe\json_decode($jsonContents, true);
        } catch (FilesystemException $e) {
            throw new ReadFileException(\Safe\sprintf(
                'Impossible to read this file %s',
                $e->getMessage()
            ));
        }
  • After
try {
            $jsonContents = \Safe\file_get_contents($this->filename);

            return \Safe\json_decode($jsonContents, true);
        } catch (FilesystemException ) {
            throw new ReadFileException(\Safe\sprintf('Impossible to read this file %s', 'er'));
        }

Here the $e variable is omitted.

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