It has been three years ago this month that PHP 5.3.0 was released and quite a few legacy functions became deprecated. Since I have my hands on a serious amount of aging enterprise projects, I can without a doubt say that the most common deprecated function I see is split(). Upgrade your code inside.

Have you seen PHP functions used without parentheses, such as echo or include? That’s because these aren’t really functions. They are a short list of entities called language constructs. See the list of constructs.

Since version 5, you can autoload classes in PHP. Autoloading functionality is part of the SPL (Standard PHP Library), a set of classes and interfaces that are meant to solve standard problems. In this article, I will show you what autoloading is all about and how you can benefit from it. Learn about autoloading.

The difference between PHP functions require and include are simply error handling. See the quick view table here. (more…)