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Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2021 14:05:25 +0000
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Small annoyances of PHP: Simple fixes would make tests
 fail
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Tommins)

On 22/02/2021 10:14, Christian Schneider wrote:
> Side-note: Maybe we should recommend a function to be used for tests. At my work we used to use var_export(), some of our newer tests are using json_encode() but neither is really guaranteed to be stable, right?


Well, the obvious choice to me would be var_dump, which is used by the 
majority of PHP's internal tests (see 
https://externals.io/message/112967#112971 for some numbers). I was 
considering putting together a pull request that standardises on that 
for all bundled extensions, fixing the few hundred (out of thousands) 
that use var_export or print_r.

However, I've never used PHPT-style tests outside of PHP internals, and 
for anything like PHPUnit or PHPSpec you would normally be testing 
against actual PHP values, not any string representation; so I don't 
really have any opinion on that scenario.

Regards,

-- 
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]