In this post let’s cover a few new interesting functions in PHP8¹

String functions

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str_contains()²

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This one has been a long time coming. Instead of

if (strpos('Lululu I've got some apples, 'apples') !== false) { /* … */ }

the following will suffice

if (str_contains('Lululu I've got some apples, 'apples')) { /* … */ }

str_starts_with() & str_ends_with()³

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Two other functions that should have been added a long time ago:

str_starts_with('haystack', 'hay') // true
str_ends_with('haystack', 'stack') // true

Types & resources

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get_debug_type()⁴

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This returns the variable type. Difference with gettype() is that get_debug_type() is more specific:

namespace Foo;

class Bar
{
}

$bar = new Bar();

echo gettype($bar)."\n"; // Object
echo get_debug_type($bar); // Foo\Bar

get_resource_id()⁵

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Before php8 we had to cast resources to int to get the id:

$resourceId = (int) $resource;

Now the good PHP people have given us a function:

$resourceId = get_resource_id($resource);