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Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2022 12:39:38 +0000
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To: "G. P. B." <george.banyard@gmail.com>
Cc: Christian Schneider <cschneid@cschneid.com>, internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Allowing NULL for some internal functions
From: craig@craigfrancis.co.uk (Craig Francis)

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On Mon, 7 Feb 2022 at 12:07, G. P. B. <george.banyard@gmail.com> wrote:

> The list of proposed functions is also excessive and just feels that any
> function which raised a diagnostic during a test run on 8.1 was chugged
> into it.
>


Not really, while I did create a throw-away script that used
`get_defined_functions()` and `ReflectionFunction` to find all function
arguments that accepted strings, and not `->allowsNull()`... I manually
checked every single one, and I considered if passing NULL to that argument
could represent a problem that warrants a Fatal Error for *everyone*.

https://github.com/craigfrancis/php-allow-null-rfc/blob/main/functions.php

This is why I have 2 other lists which I don't think justify any changes;
e.g. it's almost certainly wrong to pass `NULL` to the `$characters`
argument in `trim()`:

https://github.com/craigfrancis/php-allow-null-rfc/blob/main/functions-maybe.md
https://github.com/craigfrancis/php-allow-null-rfc/blob/main/functions-other.md

I'd argue that the length of the list represents the size of the problem
(i.e. the amount of changes developers will need to make for PHP 9)... for
example...


- setcookie
> - setrawcookie
>
> I really do not see why for the path and the domain should *ever* accept
> NULL.


Developers will often use NULL for argument defaults (remember, we didn't
show that the default was an empty string in the documentation, just that
it was an optional argument)... and considering the output for these two
functions, I see it as pretty reasonable that NULL was used as a way to say
"do not set the path attribute".

    setcookie('name', 'value', 0, '/', '', true); // set-cookie: a=a;
path=/; secure
    setcookie('name', 'value', 0, '', '', true); // set-cookie: a=a; secure
    setcookie('name', 'value', 0, NULL, '', true); // set-cookie: a=a;
secure

So back to the same question as before, why should this NULL in the last
line result in a Fatal Error for everyone who does this in PHP 9?

Craig

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