OMG PHP, I thought I knew you!

After 20+ years working with PHP, I am still discovering useful and/or funny things about it!

1. You can insert an exclamation into the DateTime::createFromFormat() method call to reset all of the remaining time units.

   // 2021-10-12 21:48:07.0
   DateTime::createFromFormat('Y-m-d', '2021-10-12');
      
   // 2021-10-12 00:00:00.0
   DateTime::createFromFormat('!Y-m-d', '2021-10-12');
   

   @Steve Baumann via Twitter

2. You can increment ASCII strings with ++

   $x = 'a';
   $x++;// $x is now 'b'
      
   $x = 'ab';
   $x++;// ac
      
   $x = 'zz';
   $x++;// aaa
      
   $x = 'ы';// cyrillic 'y', unicode
   $x++;// ы (remains the same)
   

   I think this is a horrible feature, and a very inconsistent one. Decrement doesn’t work, and neither does echo $x + 1;, after $x = '1'; $x++; $x is no longer a string but int. Overall it looks like a totally bad idea to rely on this feature. But, hail to BC, it’s still here in PHP 8.