On Jan 24, 2021, at 05:42, Rowan Tommins <rowan.coll...@gmail.com> wrote: > As far as I know I have never had any reason to generate code and then eval() > it, and can't think of a situation where I ever would. If I wanted a > machine-readable output from a variable, I would use serialize() or > json_encode(). > > That's not to say that there aren't cases where those requirements do happen, > but I think it is a very niche use case to dedicate two different built-in > functions to.
There's an interesting edge case where this does become useful. If an evaluable representation of a data structure is written to a file (wrapped with `<?php return $x;`) and subsequently loaded using `require()`, the file can be stored in opcache. This is dramatically faster than unserialize() or json_decode(), especially for large structures. What'd be particularly useful for this use case would be a function which behaved similarly to `var_export()`, but which didn't pretty-print its output, so as to yield a smaller file. -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: https://www.php.net/unsub.php
