The PHP team announced the release of the first PHP 7.3 version RC5 with added following features, syntax updates and deprecations.
Syntax
- Flexible Heredoc and Nowdoc syntax
- Allow a Trailing Comma in Function Calls
- list() reference assignment
New features
- Option to make json_encode and json_decode throw exceptions on errors
- Introduced is_countable() function
- Introduced array_key_first() and array_key_last() functions
Deprecations
- Deprecated image2wbmp() function
- Deprecated FILTER_FLAG_SCHEME_REQUIRED and FILTER_FLAG_HOST_REQUIRED flags used with FILTER_VALIDATE_URL
- Deprecated case-insensitive constants
The next release would be RC6, planned for November 22nd 2018.