What is "with" used for in PHP?

Question

I have come across this line in the eloquent ORM library:

return with(new static)->newQuery();

I've never seen "with" used before, and cannot find it in the PHP documentation. I'm guessing "with" is a stop-word in most searches, so I am not even getting close.

Never having encountered "with" in many years of programming PHP, I feel like I'm missing out. What does it do? I did come across one passing comment regarding the ORM, that mentioned "with" is no longer needed in PHP-5.4, but that was as much as was said. If that is accurate, it would be good to know what the PHP-5.4 equivalent is.

Update: Details supporting the answer:-

I found this helper function in Laravel's Immuminate/Support/helpers.php helper script:

if ( ! function_exists('with'))
{
    /**
     * Return the given object. Useful for chaining.
     *
     * @param  mixed  $object
     * @return mixed
     */
    function with($object)
    {
        return $object;
    }
}

as mentioned in a few of the answers. That global-scope function allows an object to be created and methods run in t, in one statement. It is (somehow) registered in the composer autoload_files.php script when Laravel is installed, so it gets loaded on every page, even though it contains no classes.

Thanks all. It pays not to assume that everything must be a namespaced class in modern frameworks.

Answer 1

It's a function that will look something like this:

function with($obj) { 
    return $obj; 
}

It's shorter version and more readable version for new ExampleObj()->newQuery(). with function is not build in PHP. It's workaround for older versions than PHP 5.4. As @Rocket Hazmat pointed in PHP 5.4+ you can do just new ExampleObj()->newQuery() so with function here allow you to keep readable backward compatibility.

Answer 2

The with function is a helper provided by Laravel as documented here. The best documentation is the code and as you can see, it simply returns the object. In 5.4 / 5.4 you are better off just surrounding the expression in parens to avoid the overhead of an unnecessary function call.