Time to say Good Bye

Wednesday, November 16. 2005

Yeah, it may come suddenly, but it's time to say good bye to curly braces used as string indexing operator.

PHP-5.1 will issue an E_STRICT error, and PHP-6 will probably don't know this syntax any more.

I don't know why, but I've got some strange sentimental feelings , maybe because I've never used those other brackets for string indexing...

So, beloved, I already miss you!

Posted by Mike in PHP at 16:53 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

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Wait, you mean $string{0} or $string[0] ? The latter is already deprecated, in favor of the former actually.

So now we have no way?

Perhaps because of Unicode? or what?

- Davey

#1 Davey Shafik (Link) on 2005-11-16 19:39 (Reply)

Hehe,

well yes, we *thought* $string[0] was already deprecated, but actually its usage was only discouraged in the manual.

The PHP developers who met in Paris last week have decided to get rid of $string{0} in favour of a single array/string index operator.

To be clear, PHP-5.1 will throw E_STRICT on $string{0} but stays calm on $string[0] and PHP-6 is meant to be $string{0} syntax free.

#1.1 Mike on 2005-11-16 19:45 (Reply)

And just when I was going to suggest taking the curly braces a step further! Ie: $string{0,5} (first 5 characters) $string{-5} ( last 5 characters) $string{5,5} (five characters from the middle)

The idea of not having to type out "substr" is so appealing.

Oh well, time to invest in typing classes I guess.

#2 Tim McEwen on 2005-11-16 19:55 (Reply)

We'll implement that functionality with [] instead now.

#2.1 Derick (Link) on 2005-11-16 23:17 (Reply)

It would be nice to have:

$str[3, 2] = 'replace characters 3-5 with this string (start = 3, length = 2)';
$str[5] = 'a';

too

#2.1.1 Jules Jacobs on 2005-11-19 17:16 (Reply)

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