Symfony Polyfills provide PHP implementations of certain PHP features so you can use them even if you don't have the right PHP version or PHP extension installed. Symfony Polyfill 1.15 was released recently and these are the most important changes.

PHP 8 polyfill improvements

PHP 8.0, the next major PHP version stated for release on December 3, 2020, will add some interesting features. Some of them have already been added to Symfony PHP 8 polyfill, so you can start using them today regardless of your PHP version.

Added `Stringable` interface

Contributed by
Nicolas Grekas
in #224.

Stringable is a new PHP interface that is added automatically to any object that implements __toString().

It can be used to state that you accept both strings and objects that can be converted into strings. In PHP 8 you can do that for example with the following union type: string|Stringable.

Read more about this interface in the Stringable PHP RFC.

Added `get_debug_type()`

Contributed by
Nicolas Grekas
in #226.

The new get_debug_type() function returns the given type of a variable.

It's useful to simplify the code that required using get_class() and gettype() to get the type of some variable:

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        // Before
throw new TypeError('Expected '.Foo::class.' got '.(is_object($bar) ? get_class($bar) : gettype($bar)));

// After
throw new TypeError('Expected '.Foo::class.' got '.get_debug_type($bar));
    

Read more about this function in the get_debug_type() PHP RFC.

Added `str_contains()`

Contributed by
Ion Bazan
in #229.

The new str_contains() function checks if a string is contained in another string and returns a boolean value (true/false) whether or not the string was found. This function can replace strpos() and strstr() which are often used for the same purpose but require code which sometimes is not very intuitive.

Read more about this function in the str_contains() PHP RFC.

Added `preg_last_error_msg()`

Contributed by
Nico Oelgart
in #231.

The new preg_last_error_msg() function returns a human-friendly string representation of the last PCRE regular expression execution error.

In previous PHP versions, you had to convert the error code returned by preg_last_error() into a meaningful error message.

UUID polyfill improvements

Contributed by
Grégoire Pineau and Nicolas Grekas in #236 and #240.

The UUID polyfill, which is used in the new Symfony Uid component, added support for UUID 3 and UUID 5 types.

In addition, we added support for UUID on 32-bit systems to make the polyfill truly portable.

Fixed PHP preloading

Contributed by
Nicolas Grekas
in #239.

PHP preloading is one of the most important new features introduced in PHP 7.4. This feature allows loading some functions/classes in memory to make them available to all requests, improving the application performance.

In Symfony Polyfill 1.15 we fixed some issues to make sure all polyfills are compatible with PHP preloading.

Published in #Living on the edge

Ben Hakim said on Mar 30, 2020 at 13:52

I hope it will happen :

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/annotations_v2

Javier Eguiluz Certified said on Mar 30, 2020 at 15:26

@Ben Hakim yes! We all are excited about the introduction of annotations in PHP. We hope this time they are finally added!

However, given that this would be a new language construct, we won't be able to add them to a polyfill. You'll need to upgrade your PHP version to use them.

New in Symfony Polyfills 1.15