PHP 8.5 Released

On November 20th 2025 the latest version of PHP was released.  

PHP 8.5 moves the language on with many new features, the few I'm pleased with include:

The Pipe Operator - This allows the chaining of operations for far more readable code you can now do this:

<?php

$content - "This is the content we want to play with"
   |> strtoupper
   |> str_replace("to play with", '');

echo $content; // Outputs: THIS IS THE CONTENT WE WANT
 

PHP 8.5 brings in a nice handful of useful additions.

Also new is an improved URI handler, something we need to play around with often.

<?php

use Uri\Rfc3986\Uri;

$uri = new Uri('https://orionesque.com/blog');

var_dump($uri->getHost());
// string(7) "orionesque.com"

Lastly, something that comes under “didn't we have this already…?”  Some simple array helpers

<?php
$array = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];

$first = array_first($array);
echo $first; // Output: 1

$last = array_last($array);
echo $last; // Output: 5