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Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2022 17:45:29 +0200
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To: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Add leading backslash to enum and class names in var_export
From: tovilo.ilija@gmail.com (Ilija Tovilo)

Hi everyone

We've had two bug reports for var_export not working for enums. The
reason for that is that var_export does not add a leading backslash to
names of enums. This will cause them to be resolved as
`\CurrentNamespace\EnumNamespace\EnumName` instead of just
`\EnumNamespace\EnumName`.

enum A {
    case B;
}

echo var_export(A::B, true), "\n";
> A::B


This is a problem for things like Doctrines ProxyGenerator that embeds
the result of var_export in classes with namespaces
(https://github.com/doctrine/common/pull/955). The Doctrine team
resolved this by adding a `use` of the enum at the top of the file but
that really shouldn't be necessary.

The same issue already exists for classes.

class C {}

echo var_export(new C(), true), "\n";
> C::__set_state(array(
> ))

https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=64554

Marco Pivetta created a PR that adds leading backslash to all class or
enum names of var_export. Adding a backslash will make the code work
both inside or outside namespaces.
https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/8233

To avoid disruption, I'm proposing to merge this into PHP 8.2 only.
Unless anybody has any objections to this change I will merge it in a
few weeks.

Ilija