tg-php@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" works for a while, but if there are easier and/or better ways to do things in PHP5, I want in! So someone sell me on this from the point of view of someone who's upgraded and has learned the joys of PHP5. So far what I've found online has been little more than a list of new features without an idea of how much of a headache they're going to save me in the future.
To me the main user-visible benefits of going to PHP 5 are (ignoring the
OO changes for now):
1. Simplexml
eg. One-line RSS parser (of Flickr's upload queue feed)
$url = 'http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne';
foreach(simplexml_load_file($url)->entry as $it) echo $it->content;
2. Much improved DOM support
eg. various things you can do to a DOM
// First, load your XML document into a DOM
$dom = domdocument::load('test.xml');
// Apply a stylesheet to the dom
$proc = new xsltProcessor;
$proc->importStyleSheet($domxsl);
echo $proc->transformToXML($dom);
// xpath query on the dom
$ctx = new domXPath($dom);
$result = $ctx->query('/top/child[@attr > 3]/foo/text()');
foreach($result as $node) {
echo $node->nodeValue;
}
// pull it into simplexml and access it
$s = simplexml_import_dom($dom);
echo $s->child[0]->foo;
3. xmlreader/xmlwriter
eg. SAX document validation using xmlreader
$reader = new XMLReader();
$reader->open('test.xml');
$reader->setParserProperty(XMLReader::VALIDATE, true);
while($reader->read());
echo $reader->isValid();
4. PDO
eg. Prepare execute against MySQL with named parameters
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:dbname=testdb');
$sql = 'SELECT name, colour, calories
FROM fruit
WHERE calories < :calories AND colour = :colour';
$prep = $pdo->prepare($sql);
$prep->execute(array(':calories' => 150, ':colour' => 'red'));
$red = $prep->fetchAll();
5. SOAP
eg. Exposing your PHP code as a SOAP web service
function Add($x,$y) {
return $x+$y;
}
$server = new SoapServer(null,array('uri'=>"http://test-uri/";));
$server->addFunction("Add");
$server->handle();
6. SPL
eg. Iterating over entries in a directory
$dir = new DirectoryIterator('.');
foreach($dir as $ent) echo $ent;
7. Filter
eg. Define a default filter and use form input safely without cluttering
up your code with htmlspecialchars() calls everywhere and provide
easily auditable access to the unfiltered data
php.ini: filter.default = special_chars
echo $_POST['data'];
$raw = input_get(INPUT_POST,'data', FILTER_UNSAFE_RAW);
8. Native Date/Time mechanism
Date/time functions now behave exactly the same way on every platform
regardless of the differences in locales if you choose to use the native
mechanism.
Beyond that the compiler produces smaller opcode arrays and the executor
is faster. Not a directly visible thing, and this is still improving,
but definitely a plus.
Note that for all of this I am referring to PHP 5.1.x, not 5.0.x.
-Rasmus
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