Hidden Features of PHP?
I know this sounds like a point-whoring question but let me explain where I'm coming from.
Out of college I got a job at a PHP shop. I worked there for a year and a half and thought that I had learned all there was to learn about programming.
Then I got a job as a one-man internal development shop at a sizable corporation where all the work was in C#. In my commitment to the position I started reading a ton of blogs and books and quickly realized how wrong I was to think I knew everything. I learned about unit testing, dependency injection and decorator patterns, the design principle of loose coupling, the composition over inheritance debate, and so on and on and on - I am still very much absorbing it all. Needless to say my programming style has changed entirely in the last year.
Now I find myself picking up a php project doing some coding for a friend's start-up and I feel completely constrained as opposed to programming in C#. It really bothers me that all variables at a class scope have to be referred to by appending '$this->' . It annoys me that none of the IDEs that I've tried have very good intellisense and that my SimpleTest unit tests methods have to start with the word 'test'. It drives me crazy that dynamic typing keeps me from specifying implicitly which parameter type a method expects, and that you have to write a switch statement to do method overloads. I can't stand that you can't have nested namespaces and have to use the :: operator to call the base class's constructor.
Now I have no intention of starting a PHP vs C# debate, rather what I mean to say is that I'm sure there are some PHP features that I either don't know about or know about yet fail to use properly. I am set in my C# universe and having trouble seeing outside the glass bowl.
So I'm asking, what are your favorite features of PHP? What are things you can do in it that you can't or are more difficult in the .Net languages?
Documentation . The documentation gets my vote. I haven't encountered a more thorough online documentation for a programming language - everything else I have to piece together from various websites and man pages.
Arrays . Judging from the answers to this question I don't think people fully appreciate just how easy and useful Arrays in PHP are. PHP Arrays act as lists, maps, stacks and generic data structures all at the same time. Arrays are implemented in the language core and are used all over the place which results in good CPU cache locality. Perl and Python both use separate language constructs for lists and maps resulting in more copying and potentially confusing transformations.
Stream Handlers allow you to extend the "FileSystem" with logic that as far as I know is quite difficult to do in most other languages.
For example with the MS-Excel Stream handler you can create a MS Excel file in the following way:
$fp = fopen("xlsfile://tmp/test.xls", "wb");
if (!is_resource($fp)) {
die("Cannot open excel file");
}
$data= array(
array("Name" => "Bob Loblaw", "Age" => 50),
array("Name" => "Popo Jijo", "Age" => 75),
array("Name" => "Tiny Tim", "Age" => 90)
);
fwrite($fp, serialize($data));
fclose($fp);
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