1. PHP 5.4
So what?!

2. Always prefer the english manual!

3. Backward Incompatible Changes

4. Safe mode is no longer
supported

5. Magic quotes has been removed.

6. The register_globals and
register_long_arrays ini directives
have been removed.

7. Call-time pass by reference has
been removed.

8. The break and continue statements
no longer accept variable
arguments.

9. In the date and time extension, the
timezone can no longer be set using
the TZ environment variable.

10. Non-numeric string offsets - e.g.
$a['foo'] where $a is a string - now
return false on isset() and true on
empty(), and produce a warning if
you try to use them.

11. Converting an array to a string will
now generate an E_NOTICE level
error

12. The default character set is now
UTF-8, instead of ISO-8859-1

13. New Reserved Keywords
• trait
• callable
• insteadof

14. New Features

15. Traits

16. Short array syntax
• $a = [1, 2, 3, 4];
• $a = ['one' => 1, 'two' => 2, 'three' => 3, 4];

17. Function array dereferencing
• foo()[0]

18. Closures now support $this

19. <?= is now always available,
regardless of the short_open_tag ini
option.

20. Class member access on instantiation
has been added
• (new Foo)->bar()

21. Session Upload Progress
• Session extension can now track the upload
progress of files.
• ini settings
– session.upload_progress.enabled = true
– session.upload_progress.cleanup = true
– session.upload_progress.prefix = "upload_progress_ "
– session.upload_progress.name =
"PHP_SESSION_UPLOAD_PROGRESS "
– session.upload_progress.freq = "1%"
– session.upload_progress.min-freq = 1

22. Built-in web server in CLI mode
• php -S localhost:8000 -t foo/
• C:UsersfuhrDownloadsphp-5.4.0-Win32-
VC9-x86>.php -c php.ini-development -S
localhost:8181 -t
Usersfuhrworkspacephp54src

23. Changed Functions

24. Stack Frame Limit
• array debug_backtrace ([ int $options =
DEBUG_BACKTRACE_PROVIDE_OBJECT [, int
$limit = 0 ]] )
• void debug_print_backtrace ([ int $options = 0
[, int $limit = 0 ]] )

25. New Classes and Interfaces

26. JsonSerializable

27. SessionHandler &
SessionHandlerInterface

28. CallbackFilterIterator &
RecursiveCallbackFilterIterator

29. New Methods

30. SPL
• RegexIterator::getRegex()
• SplObjectStorage::getHash()
• DirectoryIterator::getExtension()
• SplDoublyLinkedList::serialize()
• SplDoublyLinkedList::unserialize()
• SplFileInfo::getExtension()
• SplFileObject::fputcsv()
• SplQueue::serialize()
• SplQueue::unserialize()
• SplStack::serialize()
• SplStack::unserialize()
• SplTempFileObject::fputcsv()

31. Further Reading
• http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration54.
php
• http://css.dzone.com/articles/writing-clean-
code-php-54
• http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/php-5-
4-is-here-what-you-must-know/