What's new in PHP 8.5

PHP 8.5 was released on November 20, 2025. It includes the pipe operator, clone with, a new URI parser, and more.

The pipe operator

PHP 8.5 introduces the new pipe operator that makes chaining output from one function to another a lot easier. Instead of deeply nested function calls like this:

$input = ' Some kind of string. ';
$output = strtolower(
    str_replace(['.', '/', '…'], '',
        str_replace(' ', '-',
            trim($input)
        )
    )
);

You can now write this:

$output = $input
    |> trim(...)
    |> (fn (string $string) => str_replace(' ', '-', $string))
    |> (fn (string $string) => str_replace(['.', '/', '…'], '', $string))
    |> strtolower(...);

I've done a deep-dive into this new operator, and you can read about it here.

Clone with

There's now a way to assign new values to cloned objects while cloning them:

final class Book
{
    public function __construct(
        public string $title,
        public string $description,
    ) {}
    public function withTitle(string $title): self
    {
        return clone($this, [
            'title' => $title,
        ]);
    }
}

I think this is a great feature. The only thing I find unfortunate is that it doesn't work when cloning readonly properties from the outside (which I think is a common use case). To do so, you have to specifically reset the propery's write access to public(set). I explained the problem here.

(void) cast and #[NoDiscard]

You can now mark a function with the #[NoDiscard] attribute, indicating that its return value must be used. If nothing happens with that return value, a warning will be triggered.

#[NoDiscard("you must use this return value, it's very important.")]
function foo(): string {
    return 'hi';
}
foo();
$string = foo();

The warning can still be surpressed by using the new (void) cast:

(void) foo();

Closure improvements

Closures and first-class callables can now be used in constant expressions. In practice this means you'll be able to define closures in attributes, which is an incredible new feature:

#[SkipDiscovery(static function (Container $container): bool {
    return ! $container->get(Application::class) instanceof ConsoleApplication;
})]
final class BlogPostEventHandlers
{  }

Note that these kinds of closures must always be explicitly marked as static, since they aren't attached to a $this scope. They also cannot access variables from the outside scope with use.

Backtraces for fatal errors

A small but awesome change: fatal errors will now include backtraces.

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 1 second exceeded in example.php on line 6
Stack trace:
#0 example.php(6): usleep(100000)
#1 example.php(7): recurse()
#2 example.php(7): recurse()
#3 example.php(7): recurse()
#4 example.php(7): recurse()
#5 example.php(7): recurse()
#6 example.php(7): recurse()
#7 example.php(7): recurse()
#8 example.php(7): recurse()
#9 example.php(7): recurse()
#10 example.php(10): recurse()
#11 {main}

Added arrayfirst() and arraylast()

Perhaps a bit overdue (array_key_first() and array_key_last() were added in PHP 7.3), but we finally get built-in functions to get the first and last elements from arrays! So instead of writing this:

$first = $array[array_key_first($array)] ?? null;

You can now write this:

$first = array_first($array);

URI parsing

There's a brand new URI implemention that makes working with URIs a lot easier:

use Uri\Rfc3986\Uri;
$uri = new Uri('https://tempestphp.com/2.x/getting-started/introduction');
$uri->getHost();
$uri->getScheme();
$uri->getPort();

The #[DelayedTargetValidation] attribute

Some built-in attributes (like #[Override]) are validated at compile-time rather than at runtime when being called via reflection. The #[DelayedTargetValidation] allows you to postpone that validation to a runtime:

class Child extends Base
{
	#[DelayedTargetValidation]
	#[Override]
	public const NAME = 'Child';
}

This attribute is added to manage backwards compatibility issues. You can read a concrete example here.

Smaller changes

• Asymmetric visibility support for static properties
• Added support for attributes on compile-time non-class constants
• Constructor property promotion can now be used for final properties
• #[\Override] can now be applied to properties
• Added Dom\Element::$outerHTML
• The Exif extension now supports HEIF and HEIC images
• There's a new FILTER_THROW_ON_FAILURE flag when calling filter_var()

Deprecations and breaking changes

• Non-standard cast names like (boolean) and (integer) are deprecated
• Backticks as an alias for shell_exec() are deprecated
• Constant redeclaration has been deprecated
• The disabled_classes ini setting has been removed
• You can find all breaking changes and deprecations here

Those are the features and changes that stand out for PHP 8.5; you can find the whole list of everything that's changed over here.

What are your thoughts about PHP 8.5? You can leave them in the comments below!