This type-hinting only works for validating function arguments; you can’t declare that a PHP variable must always be of a certain type. This means that in your example, $bur must be of type Bur when “blah” is called, but $bur could be reassigned to a non-Bur value inside the function. Type-hinting only works for class … Read more
This is deliberately not possible, because the implementation adopted after an extremely long discussion of scalar type hints was this one: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/scalar_type_hints_v5 It introduces two modes for scalar type parameters, which both guarantee that the function receiving the parameters gets the types that it requires in its signature. However, it provides two modes for how … Read more
There isn’t any syntax that would accomplish this in a better way than just writing the type twice.
PHP 7.4 will support typed properties like so: class Person { public string $name; public DateTimeImmutable $dateOfBirth; } PHP 7.3 and earlier do not support this, but there are some alternatives. You can make a private property which is accessible only through getters and setters which have type declarations: class Person { private $name; public … Read more
You were close: if (typeof a_string === ‘string’) { // this is a string } On a related note: the above check won’t work if a string is created with new String(‘hello’) as the type will be Object instead. There are complicated solutions to work around this, but it’s better to just avoid creating strings … Read more
The two are indeed synonymous; int will be a little more familiar looking, Int32 makes the 32-bitness more explicit to those reading your code. I would be inclined to use int where I just need ‘an integer’, Int32 where the size is important (cryptographic code, structures) so future maintainers will know it’s safe to enlarge … Read more