Null Coalescing Assignment Operator in PHP 7.4

[chrisblakley]

Currently how this is handled (PHP 7+):

$data['date'] = $data['date'] ?? new DateTime();

In PHP 7.4:

$data['date'] ??= new DateTime();

[chrisblakley]

It'll probably be a few years before we can implement this since we need to remain somewhat agnostic to PHP versions. Either when older versions stop being used or if/when WordPress bumps its minimum to 7.4 we won't be able to use this.

In the meantime, I want to go through and check to use the initial snippet above in more places.

[chrisblakley]

Here is a RegEx pattern to help find potential updates for this:

This finds any string of 3 characters like $whatever = $whatever

([^\s=]{3,})\s={1}\s\1\s

This one will look for variables of any length (may have slightly more false positives, but the \s at the end helps prevent that):

([^\s=]+)\s={1}\s\1\s

FYI it's somewhat tailored to my style of syntax (with consistent spaces).

[chrisblakley]

...and I didn't find any with the above syntax. This may end up being a more manual process and I can't imagine there are a whole ton of usage of this.

[chrisblakley]

Some more regex patterns for fun...

This one will match long form if conditionals checking for empty variables

if \( empty\((\S+)\) \){\n\s+\1\s

if ( empty($whatever) ){
	$whatever = 'something';
}

---

This one will capture ternary operators of the same type of thing as above.

(\S+) = \( empty\(\1\)

$something = ( empty($something) )? $something : 'another';

Again, these use my particular syntax for spaces.

[chrisblakley]

...I find it hard to believe that none of those patterns exist in Nebula either. But I found 0 results for either of the above too.

[chrisblakley]

Found one that uses this:

if ( !$url ){
	$url = $this->requested_url();
}

Here is the pattern for that:

if \( !(\S+) \){\n\s?\1 =

[chrisblakley]

Ok, I added a bunch of comments to update some lines to null coalescing operators in the future.

//@todo "Nebula" 0: Use null coalescing operator here