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Message-ID: <dd9cb977-37d4-4e33-ae0f-65c02502d8f9@sandfox.me>
Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2025 12:07:37 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC Idea] Short echo tag with automatic HTML escaping
 (<?~ ... ?>)
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From: sandfox@sandfox.me (Anton Smirnov)

Hi!

On 23/12/2025 11:06, Sergei Issaev wrote:
> which compiles to:
> 
> ```
> <?php echo htmlspecialchars($expr, ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | 
> ENT_HTML5, 'UTF-8'); ?>
> ```

htmlspecialchars is configurable for a reason and your flags are 
arbitrarily different from the function default

> - Syntax is currently a parse error → no BC break.

It's not, you forgot about short_open_tag=1, in which case it's 
interpreted as <? (~$expr) ?>


I basically see no value over

// included earlier
function h($s)
{
    return htmlspecialchars($s, ENT_QUOTES | ENT_HTML5, 'UTF-8');
}

// template
<?= h($user_input) ?>

It's short, it does what you want, it's available today

-- 
Anton