This project backports features found in the latest PHP versions and provides compatibility layers for some extensions and functions. It is intended to be used when portability across PHP versions and extensions is desired.

Polyfills are provided for:

• the mbstring and iconv extensions;
• the Normalizer class and the grapheme_* functions;
• the utf8_encode and utf8_decode functions from the xml extension;
• the Collator, NumberFormatter, Locale and IntlDateFormatter classes;
• the intl_error_name, intl_get_error_code, intl_get_error_message and intl_is_failure functions;
• the hex2bin function, the CallbackFilterIterator, RecursiveCallbackFilterIterator and SessionHandlerInterface classes introduced in PHP 5.4;
• the array_column, boolval, json_last_error_msg and hash_pbkdf2 functions introduced in PHP 5.5;
• the password_hash and password_* related functions introduced in PHP 5.5, provided by the ircmaxell/password-compat package;
• the hash_equals and ldap_escape functions introduced in PHP 5.6;
• the *Error classes, the error_clear_last, preg_replace_callback_array and intdiv functions introduced in PHP 7.0;
• the random_bytes and random_int functions introduced in PHP 7.0, provided by the paragonie/random_compat package;
• a Binary utility class to be used when compatibility with mbstring.func_overload is required.

It is strongly recommended to upgrade your PHP version and/or install the missing extensions whenever possible. This polyfill should be used only when there is no better choice or when portability is a requirement.

To write portable code between PHP5 and PHP7, some care must be taken:

• \*Error exceptions must by caught before \Exception;
• after calling error_clear_last(), the result of $e = error_get_last() must be verified using isset($e['message'][0]) instead of null === $e.

This package is designed for low overhead and high quality polyfilling.

It adds only a few lightweight require statements to the bootstrap process to support all polyfills. Implementations are then loaded on-demand when needed during code execution.

Polyfills are unit-tested alongside their native implementation so that feature and behavior parity can be proven and enforced in the long run.

This library is released under the MIT license.