PART 3The Standard PHPLibrary (SPL)
CHAPTER 9Introduction to SPL
The Standard PHP Library (SPL) is where PHP 5's object-oriented capabilities truly shine. It improves the language in five key ways: iterators, exceptions, array overloading, XML, and file and data handling. It also provides a few other useful items, such as the observer pattern, counting, helper functions for object identification, and iterator processing. Additionally, it offers advanced functionality for autoloading classes and interfaces. This chapter introduces you to this very important library, and in the following chapters, you will learn more about some of the advanced SPL classes.
SPL is enabled by default and is available on most PHP 5 systems. However, because SPL's ...
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