What’s New and Exciting in PHP 7.1?

The PHP community has gone viral with the latest PHP 7 announcement and all the goodies it brings to the language. The PHP 7.1 release has more good news and features to offer. This article highlights the most important ones, and you should check PHP RFC for the full list.

ArgumentCountError Exception

Earlier versions of PHP allowed for function calls with fewer arguments than specified, emitting a warning when you have a missing argument.

// PHP 5.6

function sum($a, $b)
{
    return $a + $b;
}

sum(); 
// Warning: Missing argument 1 for sum()
// Warning: Missing argument 2 for sum()

sum(3);
// Warning: Missing argument 2 for sum()

sum(3, 4);

Warnings are not useful for this case, and the developer should check if all arguments are set correctly. In PHP 7.1, those warnings have been converted into an ArgumentCountError exception.

// PHP 7.1

function sum($a, $b)
{
    return $a + $b;
}

sum(); 
// Fatal error: Uncaught ArgumentCountError: Too few arguments to function sum(), 0 passed in /vagrant/index.php on line 18 and exactly 2 expected in /vagrant/index.php:13

sum(3); // skipped

sum(3, 4); // skipped 

Nullable Types

PHP 7 added type declarations for parameters and return types, but it seemed that something was missing! Nullable types enable for the specified type to take either that type or null. Here's an example:

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by Younes Rafie via SitePoint