PHP 8.5 Adds Pipe Operator: What it means
PHP 8.5, due out November of this year, will bring with it another long-sought-after feature: the pipe operator (|>). It's a small feature with huge potential, yet it still took years to happen.
The pipe operator, spelled |>, is deceptively simple. It takes the value on its left side and passes it as the single argument to a function (or in PHP's case, callable) on its right side:
On its own, that is not all that interesting. Where it becomes interesting is when it is repeated, or chained, to form a "pipeline." For example, here's real code from a real project I've worked on, recast to use pipes:
Or manually creating a temporary variable for each step. While temp variables are not the worst thing in the world, they are extra mental overhead, and mean that a chain like that cannot be used in a single-expression context, like a match() block. A pipe chain can.
Anyone who has worked on the Unix/Linux command line will likely recognize the similarity to the shell pipe, |. That's very deliberate, as it is effectively the same thing: Use the output from the left side as the input on the right side.
