On 23.11.2023 the new PHP 8.3 was released on schedule and officially considered a minor release but some changes can directly affect your work with PHP. In this article, I will mention a couple of improvements that I was waiting for or that improved my work.

Honestly, I don't understand why PHP didn't have this method before. In the era of headless applications, access to a lot of information by the API services, and the fact that JSON format was invented in the early 2000s it was a missing piece of the puzzle. In the previous version of PHP, we were forced to use some strange techniques to check if JSON is valid. The most popular that I met was just decoding JSON responses and checking if there were some errors. This was not a cool solution or even elegant code.

Now, finally, we have like the knight on the white horse - the method - json_validate() which returns a bool value depending on whether the JSON response is valid or not

var_dump(json_validate('{ "test": { "foo": "bar" } }')); // true

The command line linter now accepts variadic input for filenames to lint

// Before PHP 8.3
> php -l foo.php bar.php
No syntax errors detected in foo.php

// PHP 8.3
> php -l foo.php bar.php
No syntax errors detected in foo.php
No syntax errors detected in bar.php

One of the main features of this release is adding the possibility to specify a type of constant variables in classes, interfaces, traits, and enum. It can improve code readability and secure us against future bugs that are hard to detect.

interface I {
    const string PHP = 'PHP 8.3';
}

class Foo implements I {
    const string PHP = [];
}

This attribute added to the method ensures that a method with the same name exists in the parent class or interface and an override process is intended.

PHP < 8.3

use PHPUnit\Framework\TestCase;

final class MyTest extends TestCase {
    protected $logFile;

    protected function setUp(): void {
       $this->logFile = fopen('/tmp/logfile', 'w');
    }

    protected function taerDown(): void {
       fclose($this->logFile);
        unlink('/tmp/logfile');
    }
}
// The log file will never be removed, because the
// method name was mistyped (taerDown vs tearDown).

PHP 8.3

use PHPUnit\Framework\TestCase;

final class MyTest extends TestCase {
    protected $logFile;

    protected function setUp(): void {
        $this->logFile = fopen('/tmp/logfile', 'w');
    }

    protected function taerDown(): void {
        fclose($this->logFile);
        unlink('/tmp/logfile');
    }
}
// Fatal error: MyTest::taerDown() has #[\Override] attribute,
// but no matching parent method exists

Of course, those are not all improvements. Does release 8.3 add the improvements that you were waiting for?