PHP 8.1: What's New and Changed
PHP 8.1 is currently in active development, and it will be released towards the end of year 2021.
New Features
- Enums
neverreturn type- Fibers
finalclass constants- New
fsyncandfdatasyncfunctions - New
array_is_listfunction - New Sodium
XChaCha20functions - Intl: New
IntlDatePatternGeneratorclass - GD: AVIF image support
$_FILES: Newfull_pathvalue for directory-uploads- Array unpacking support for string-keyed arrays
- Explicit Octal numeral notation
- Hash functions accept algorithm-specific
$options - MurmurHash3 hash algorithm support
- xxHash hash algorithms support
- FPM: Configurable child-process spawn rate
- Curl: DNS-over-HTTPS support
- Curl: File uploads from strings with
CURLStringFile - MySQLi: New
MYSQLI_REFRESH_REPLICAconstant
Syntax/Functionality Changes
- HTML entity en/decode functions process single quotes and substitute by default
- CLI: Interactive shell (
php -a) requiresreadlineextension - MySQLi: Default error mode set to exceptions
- Configurable line endings for
fputcsvandSplFileObject::fputcsv version_compareoperator restrictions- Warning on
compactfunction calls with non-string and non-array string parameters - finfo Extension:
file_inforesource are migrated to existingfinfoobjects - IMAP:
imapresources areIMAP\Connectionclass objects - FTP Extension: Connection resources are
FTP\Connectionclass objects - GD Extension: Font identifiers are
GdFontclass objects - LDAP:
resources migrated toLDAP\Connection,LDAP\Result, andLDAP\ResultEntryobjects - Pspell:
pspell,pspell configresources arePSpell\Dictionary,PSpell\Configclass objects
Deprecations
- Passing
nullto non-nullable internal function parameters is deprecated - Return types in PHP built-in class methods and deprecation notices
Serializableinterface deprecated- Implicit incompatible float to int conversion is deprecated
mysqli::get_client_infomethod andmysqli_get_client_info($param)is deprecated- MySQLi:
mysqli_driver->driver_versionproperty is deprecated