Re: [RFC] Deprecations for PHP 8.6

Hi Am 2026-06-25 00:58, schrieb Morgan:

It's a different category of problem (and a lot more difficult than just swapping out an alias), but gettype() returns "double" and "integer" for floats and ints (and "boolean" for bools). A change would require users to write a translator wrapper around gettype that continues to output the old names and call that until they're able to replace all their uses of them: $t = gettype($v); return $t === 'integer' ? 'int' : ($t === 'double' ? 'float' : $t);

There already is get_debug_type() as a replacement that is documented to:

[differ] from gettype() in that it returns type names that are more consistent with actual usage, rather than those present for historical reasons

And the documentation page for gettype() also mentions that:

For type checking, use is_* functions.

meaning that gettype() is not supposed to be used for actual type *checking* (e.g. with a switch(gettype($var))). If it's not intended for this use, then “human readable output” remains as a possible use case, which is already better solved by get_debug_type() which outputs the canonical names and also class names instead of just object. Given the replacement already being available since PHP 8.0 (and polyfillable, see https://github.com/symfony/polyfill/blob/a9a8687879dfea232e90d38ba949f65c3ece4456/src/Php80/Php80.php#L28-L58), the correct action would be not to adjust the function any more and to deprecate it with a reference to get_debug_type(). Best regards Tim Düsterhus