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PHP Types 🐘

PHP Types is a small library/framework aimed to improve and encourage strong typing across your project's codebase, consisting of basic array-types, useful data structures and more, that are not natively available by the language itself.

Table of contents 📖

1. Requirements
2. Installation
3. Usage
   • 3.1 Primitive types
   • • 3.1.1 Extending PHP primitive types
   • • 3.1.2 ObjectType
   • 3.2 Primitive arrays
   • • 3.2.2 BoolArray
   • • 3.2.3 IntArray
   • • 3.2.4 FloatArray
   • • 3.2.5 StringArray
   • • 3.2.6 ObjectArray
   • • 3.2.7 Extra primitives arrays
   • 3.3 Standard types
   • • 3.3.1 Standard Ints
   • • 3.3.2 size_t
   • • 3.3.3 Standard Ints Arrays
   • 3.4 Data structures
   • • 3.4.1 HashSet
   • • 3.4.2 IntHashSet
   • • 3.4.3 StringHashSet
   • 3.5 Type errors
   • 3.6 hasAny() and isEmpty() methods
   • 3.7 The splice method
   • 3.8 The length property
   • 3.9 Defining custom types
   • • 3.9.1 Defining custom arrays
   • • 3.9.2 typedef()

Requirements

1. PHP 8.3.0 or major
2. Composer (optional)
3. Have an initted Composer project (optional)

Installation

Install PHP Types via Composer:

or:

You can always download the library as .zip file, decompress it, store it somewhere in your target project and include the autoload.php file from the library's project root:

or:

You can download the packed .phar version of the library:

Usage

Primitive types

Extending PHP primitive types

PHP Types adds some cool extra types that you can play around with:

ObjectType

Primitive arrays

BoolArray

IntArray

FloatArray

StringArray

ObjectArray

Extra primitives arrays

Standard types

Standard Ints

Similarly to C, you can make use of the standard types (as you would by including the standard library) to specify and maintain integer values in certain ranges:

Note: keep in mind that these are only representative values and not actual low-level values where we're not saving space by storing specific bytes per integer.

size_t

We can also make use of the size_t data type to store large numbers based on sizes, lengths, etc:

Standard Ints Arrays

Data structures

HashSet

IntHashSet

StringHashSet

Type errors

In case you attempt to assign a value with a type different than an array's type, a TypeError is thrown:

hasAny() and isEmpty() methods

Arrays contain useful methods that help to determine whether if they're empty or contain at least 1 element in them:

The splice method

You can make use of the splice method from arrays the same way you'd use the array_splice function with normal arrays:

The splice method returns a multiple, consisting of the resultant array along with the extracted elements respectively.

The length property

Similarly to JavaScript/JS, you can make use of the length property to retrieve the count of total elements from a specific array:

Defining custom types

Defining custom arrays

To define custom arrays, you can create a new class that extends PHPTypes\ArrayObject and implements a typed constructor for such purpose, e.g:

typedef()

It is very common that we may need to define multiple arrays for multiple classes from our project/app, to do so, we can simplify the previous example with the usage of the typedef function, just like this:

Notice the usage of the @disregard and @var phpDoc tags to preserve the array treatment per User and recognize the acccess to all its properties and methods by our preferred text editor. We also conjunct the @var type definition with the ArrayObject type to recognize access to methods such as count, hasAny, isEmpty, splice, etc.

In case our User class resides inside a specific namespace, we can specify the full path to the namespace when calling typedef to define the new array inside the same namespace:

It is also recommended and a good practice to define custom types in a separate and dedicated file that can be accessed across our app, such as types.php