Hidden Features of PHP? [closed]

Question

Documentation. The documentation gets my vote. I haven't encountered a more thorough online documentation for a programming language - everything else I have to piece together from various websites and man pages.

Arrays. Judging from the answers to this question I don't think people fully appreciate just how easy and useful Arrays in PHP are. PHP Arrays act as lists, maps, stacks and generic data structures all at the same time. Arrays are implemented in the language core and are used all over the place which results in good CPU cache locality. Perl and Python both use separate language constructs for lists and maps resulting in more copying and potentially confusing transformations.

Stream Handlers allow you to extend the "FileSystem" with logic that as far as I know is quite difficult to do in most other languages.

For example with the MS-Excel Stream handler you can create a MS Excel file in the following way:

$fp = fopen("xlsfile://tmp/test.xls", "wb");
if (!is_resource($fp)) { 
    die("Cannot open excel file");
}

$data= array(
    array("Name" => "Bob Loblaw", "Age" => 50),  
    array("Name" => "Popo Jijo", "Age" => 75),  
    array("Name" => "Tiny Tim", "Age" => 90)
); 

fwrite($fp, serialize($data));
fclose($fp);

Magic Methods are fall-through methods that get called whenever you invoke a method that doesn't exist or assign or read a property that doesn't exist, among other things.

interface AllMagicMethods {
    // accessing undefined or invisible (e.g. private) properties
    public function __get($fieldName);
    public function __set($fieldName, $value);
    public function __isset($fieldName);
    public function __unset($fieldName);

    // calling undefined or invisible (e.g. private) methods
    public function __call($funcName, $args);
    public static function __callStatic($funcName, $args); // as of PHP 5.3

    // on serialize() / unserialize()
    public function __sleep();
    public function __wakeup();

    // conversion to string (e.g. with (string) $obj, echo $obj, strlen($obj), ...)
    public function __toString();

    // calling the object like a function (e.g. $obj($arg, $arg2))
    public function __invoke($arguments, $...);

    // called on var_export()
    public static function __set_state($array);
}

A C++ developer here might notice, that PHP allows overloading some operators, e.g. () or (string). Actually PHP allows overloading even more, for example the [] operator (ArrayAccess), the foreach language construct (Iterator and IteratorAggregate) and the count function (Countable).