New in PHP 8

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New in PHP 8 - php 8 0

#Reclassified engine warnings RFC

Lots of errors that previously only triggered warnings or notices, have been converted to proper errors. The following warnings were changed.

  • Undefined variable: Error exception instead of notice
  • Undefined array index: warning instead of notice
  • Division by zero: DivisionByZeroError exception instead of warning
  • Attempt to increment/decrement property ‘%s’ of non-object: Error exception instead of warning
  • Attempt to modify property ‘%s’ of non-object: Error exception instead of warning
  • Attempt to assign property ‘%s’ of non-object: Error exception instead of warning
  • Creating default object from empty value: Error exception instead of warning
  • Trying to get property ‘%s’ of non-object: warning instead of notice
  • Undefined property: %s::$%s: warning instead of notice
  • Cannot add element to the array as the next element is already occupied: Error exception instead of warning
  • Cannot unset offset in a non-array variable: Error exception instead of warning
  • Cannot use a scalar value as an array: Error exception instead of warning
  • Only arrays and Traversables can be unpacked: TypeError exception instead of warning
  • Invalid argument supplied for foreach(): TypeError exception instead of warning
  • Illegal offset type: TypeError exception instead of warning
  • Illegal offset type in isset or empty: TypeError exception instead of warning
  • Illegal offset type in unset: TypeError exception instead of warning
  • Array to string conversion: warning instead of notice
  • Resource ID#%d used as offset, casting to integer (%d): warning instead of notice
  • String offset cast occurred: warning instead of notice
  • Uninitialized string offset: %d: warning instead of notice
  • Cannot assign an empty string to a string offset: Error exception instead of warning

#Default error reporting level

It’s now E_ALL instead of everything but E_NOTICE and E_DEPRECATED. This means that many errors might pop up which were previously silently ignored, though probably already existent before PHP 8.

#The @ operator no longer silences fatal errors

It’s possible that this change might reveal errors that again were hidden before PHP 8. Make sure to set display_errors=Off on your production servers!

#Concatenation precedence RFC

While already deprecated in PHP 7.4, this change is now taken into effect. If you’d write something like this:

echo "sum: " . $a + $b;

PHP would previously interpret it like this:

echo ("sum: " . $a) + $b;

PHP 8 will make it so that it’s interpreted like this:

echo "sum: " . ($a + $b);


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