Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:129685
Message-ID: <827cd223-226d-43c6-97f6-ccbe5492fb5e@mail.ru>
Date: Wed, 24 Dec 2025 09:28:57 +0500
Precedence: list
MIME-Version: 1.0
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC Idea] Short echo tag with automatic HTML escaping
 (<?~ ... ?>)
To: Anton Smirnov <sandfox@sandfox.me>, internals@lists.php.net
References: <7c592a80-76a5-4b16-9c7b-a354aa34802a@mail.ru>
 <dd9cb977-37d4-4e33-ae0f-65c02502d8f9@sandfox.me>
 <c35b9f9b-9896-4b40-82fa-6d69f33b901f@mail.ru>
 <03590ce8-8037-4409-bc0e-603c692fe349@sandfox.me>
Content-Language: en-US
In-Reply-To: <03590ce8-8037-4409-bc0e-603c692fe349@sandfox.me>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
From: sergei_vi@mail.ru (Sergei Issaev)

Hi Anton,

Thank you for the discussion!

 >> - short_open_tag has been disabled by default since PHP 5.4 (2012).
 >
 > But there is no plan to remove them, see:
 > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate_php_short_tags_v2
 > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/counterargument/deprecate_php_short_tags

 > <?= exists since forever and "= $expr" is not a valid code. You 
should at least choose another symbol (like "<?*").

I agree: since short tags remain valid syntax, the parser and tooling 
must correctly handle them in all configuration states.

Therefore, I propose replacing `<?~ ... ?>` with `<?: ... ?>`.

 > See above, also respecting default_charset is a must imho, not 
everyone uses UTF-8, East Asia specifically. Introducing a core syntax 
and excluding a huge portion of users is not a good move.

The semantics of `<?: $expr ?>` would be equivalent to: `<?php echo 
htmlspecialchars($expr, ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE | ENT_HTML5); ?>` -- 
that is, the encoding will be determined automatically via the current 
default_charset setting, as htmlspecialchars() does by default.

Best regards,
Sergei Issaev