• __callStatic()
• Circular reference garbage collection
• get_called_class()
• Closures
• DateTime::getTimestamp()
• Namespaces
• Late Static Binding
• Phar as part of the default install
• __DIR__ — no more dirname(__FILE__)!

PHP 5.3.0 was released on 23 June, 2009! A migration guide is available.

$property_name = 'color';
echo $theClass->$property_name; // same as $theClass->color

The documentation does mention a potential tripping point with array index ambiguity. You might expect the following references to be equal:

$prop = 'internalArray';
$theClass = new stdClass;
$theClass->internalArray = array('red', 'white', 'blue');
echo $theClass->internalArray[2] == $theClass->$prop[2] ? "equal" : "not equal";

However, the above code will output “not equal” because $prop[2] is evaluated first. This returns a character index within $prop, so the final check is against $theClass->t, which is not set. Curly braces around the property can be used to clarify your meaning:

echo $theClass->internalArray[3] == $theClass->{$prop}[2] ? "equal" : "not equal";

The Problem

By default, Smarty uses curly braces to denote template tags, ie. {foreach from=$widgets item=widget}. The left and right tag delimiter are configurable, defaulting to { and }, respectively. Whitespace is allowed after the left delimiter. This means the following CSS rule is interpreted as a Smarty tag:

<style type="text/css">
body { font-size: 80%; }
</script>

This would generate an error, claiming “syntax error: unrecognized tag: font-size: 80%.” You can use the {literal} tag to escape a block of text, or use {ldelim} instead of “{“, or change the delimiter to something less common like <!--{. I would prefer the XTemplate behavior.

The Solution

Here is a patch that modifies Smarty to ignore left delimiters which are immediately followed by whitespace. {foreach} would be parsed, but { foreach} would not. This has potential security implications since an errant space could expose part of your template to the world, but it has the potential to simplify some very convoluted markup.

I’ve done some limited testing (including creating a one-character template tag) and it seems to work fine. I’ll have to try with some more complicated templates, but hopefully this will make its way into our Smarty as a custom mod. (Thankfully we deploy Smarty via Subversion, so it’s relatively easy to mod the local library install.)

Turns out I was using a storage engine that did not support transactions. While InnoDB is ACID-compliant, MyISAM has no support for transactions. Whoops. A few ALTER TABLEs later and I’m back in business.

Here are some good resources I found while digging into this:

1. Secrets of tabs in vim
2. Notes on using Vim and Python — check out the autoindentation based on file name, just below the main table
3. Converting tabs to spaces

Bonus: check out vimrc in the python “Vim” folder for other helpful files.