Month: October 2018

Bitmask Constant Arguments in PHP

Liam Hammett (check many of his other excellent posts) has a nice explanation of the bitmask constant arguments in PHP.  These are fairly common and most PHP developers have seen them.  However, it’s been a few occasions where I discovered that especially newer developers don’t understand how this works.

Bitmask arguments and operations were used extensively in programming by the older generations, especially where CPU and memory were critical.  But with hardware getting so much cheaper over the last few decades, nobody really cares about an extra few memory bytes and CPU cycles.

Regardless of the memory and CPU though, bitmask arguments are still quite handy and using them can significantly simplify the code.

PHP Safe and Rector

I came across a couple of very interesting PHP libraries today.

The first one is thecodingmachine/safe.  This library wraps all PHP functions that return false on failure into another function that throws the exception instead. Think of all those file_get_contents() and json_decode() situations you had to code around.  Not anymore.  You can easily have them throw exceptions now.  Read this blog post for more details.

The second one is rectorphp/rector.  It is in fact mentioned in the documentation for the above library.  Rector is a refactoring (reconstruction and upgrade) tool that can easily change large chunks of your code.  Think of function renaming, parameter changes, and such.  Read these blog posts for more details: part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Very handy!

PHP assertions and assertion libraries

I’ve blogged about PHP assertions and assertion libraries a while back.  I haven’t started using the assertions anywhere outside of unit tests yet, but with more and more bloat added to the code to check for types and particular values, I keep coming back to the idea.

Today I came across a nice article by Matthias Noback which once again made me consider assertion libraries in my codebase.  I’ll discuss with colleagues and hopefully we’ll make the decision once and for all on whether assertions are a good way to go forward.

7 Tips to Write Exceptions Everyone Will Love

Tomas Votruba shares the “7 Tips to Write Exceptions Everyone Will Love“.  These all make a lot of sense and are generic enough to be applicable to any programming language (that implements exceptions).  The list of tips is as follows:

  1. Make Exception Names for Humans
  2. Use Quotes Around Statements
  3. What Exactly is Wrong?
  4. What is The Wrong Value?
  5. What File Exactly is Broken?
  6. What Options do I have?
  7. Link what You can’t Fit 140 Chars

Read the full article for both good and bad examples, as well as the explanations of the above.