Mastering PHP

October 9, 2019 by Kenny

If you’re like me, you have probably had this happen. You go to click on one of the many tabs you have open in PHPStorm, only to accidentally click the X, and close it. ARGH!

Today I found a way to alleviate that pain. You can turn off the X!

1. Under Preferences, search for Editor Tabs
2. Locate Close button position:
3. Set it to None

Now, to close a tab, you must either hit the keyboard shortcut, or right-click it. Either of those will be a deliberate action.

May 14, 2019 by Kenny

1. iteratable psuedo type

This is a new type that can be used to more generically indicate that what is being passed can be iterated over using something like foreach. Prior to this, you could not type hint an iterable custom object.

2. Closure from callable

Allows you to create a closure from any callable function. This new technique will help catch typos up front, and improves performance.

3 and 4. Square bracket syntax for list.

This one is a shorthand for list($a, $b, $c) = [‘a’,’b’,’c’]; We can now write [$a, $b, $c] = [‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’]; It also now allows you to specify the keys, and supports multi-dimensional arrays.

5. Class constant visibility

Class constants can now explicitly be set to protected, private, or public to aid in information hiding.

6. Nullable types

Now you can type hint, and allow optional null. Just put a ? in front of the type hint. Applies to function params and return types.

7. Void functions

You can now specify that a function may only return void. function foo() : void

8. Catching multiple exception types

Catch can now have more than one exception type. Just separate them with a | like catch(FooException | BarException)

9. Too few arguments exception

This one just means that in PHP 7.1, calling a function without required parameters will trigger an Error exception. It was a warning previously, but now you have to deal with it. This is a potentially breaking change when upgrading.