🚀 PHP 8.5: What’s New and Changed – A Developer’s Guide

The Pipe Operator (|>)

The most anticipated feature, the pipe operator, allows for elegant function chaining without deep nesting or intermediary variables. It passes the result of the expression on its left as the first argument to the callable on its right.

Example (Concept):

// Before (Nested Calls):
$result = trim(strtoupper(" Hello World "));

// After (Pipe Operator):
$result = " Hello World "
    |> trim(...)
    |> strtoupper(...);
                

clone with Property Updates

You can now update properties directly during the cloning process by passing an associative array to the clone function. This simplifies the creation of “with-er” methods, especially for readonly classes and immutable Value Objects.

Example:

final readonly class User {
    public function __construct(
        public int $id,
        public string $name
    ) {}

    public function withName(string $name): self {
        // New PHP 8.5 syntax
        return clone($this, ['name' => $name]);
    }
}
                

#[NoDiscard] Attribute

This new attribute helps catch common bugs by emitting a warning if a function’s return value (which is likely important) is ignored or not used.

Example:

#[NoDiscard("The result must be checked for success/failure.")]
function performCrucialAction(): bool {
    // ...
    return $success;
}

performCrucialAction(); // Warning: Return value is expected to be consumed
$result = performCrucialAction(); // OK
                

URI Extension

PHP now includes a built-in, standards-compliant URI extension for parsing, normalizing, and handling URLs according to RFC 3986 and the WHATWG URL standards. This provides a more robust and predictable API than legacy functions like parse_url().