Published December 03, 2015 By Richard Bagshaw - Edit page on Github

Written by Richard Bagshaw a php, javascript, vue and react freelancer who lives and works in Nottingham, UK. Follow me on Twitter

In this series of blog posts I will be covering some of the new features available in the upcoming release of PHP 7, I know we are all very busy bees, so this series gets to the point and may be useful for anyone just wanting to understand these features quickly.

The Combined Comparison Operator

The Spaceship Operator is the unofficial name for obvious reasons; the more professional sounding name is the “Combined Comparison Operator” but what does it do and why do we need it?

I’ve seen this explained in a few ways by various developers, and whilst they are correct, they don’t explain what this operator does at a bare bones level.

So in PHP, we would compare two values and return a boolean to indicate if this comparison was true or false

1 == 2 2 == 2 1 != 13 55 > 102

In PHP 7 we can use the “combined comparison operator” (or spaceship) for comparing two variables, but instead of returning either true or false we will instead return -1 , 0 or 1 .

The 0 represents equality while 1 represents greater than and -1 represents less than.

As an example, the kind of results we expect back from this operator are as follows.

1 <= > 1 2 <= > 1 1 <= > 2 156 <= = > 12 19 <= = > 20

At its core this is all the spaceship operator does, nothing more than comparing two values and returning either -1 , 0 or 1 .

Uhhhhh, why?

If you’re anything like me then you might not see how useful this is right away, the first time I read about this I had no idea where I would use this or why, but my conclusion is … sorting

PHP 5 and usort()

In PHP 5 we have the ability to perform a user defined sort, this is what you might expect, you pass in an array that needs sorting, and a callable function that is used to compare items in the array to determine the order.

Within the callable we can return -1 if it’s less than, 0 if its equal and 1 if it is greater than.

$smallPeople = [ 'Doc' , 'Grumpy' , 'Happy' , 'Sleepy' , 'Sneezy' , 'Dopey' , 'Bashful' ] ; usort ( $smallPeople , function ( $a , $b ) { if ( $a == $b ) { return 0 ; } if ( $a > $b ) { return 1 ; } if ( $a < $b ) { return - 1 ; } } ) ; var_dump ( $smallPeople ) ;

In this example, when we var_dump() the array we should now see that the elements are sorted in alphabetical order.

array ( 7 ) { [ 0 ] = > string ( 7 ) "Bashful" [ 1 ] = > string ( 3 ) "Doc" [ 2 ] = > string ( 5 ) "Dopey" [ 3 ] = > string ( 6 ) "Grumpy" [ 4 ] = > string ( 5 ) "Happy" [ 5 ] = > string ( 6 ) "Sleepy" [ 6 ] = > string ( 6 ) "Sneezy" }

Sorting arrays like this is perfectly acceptable, if not a little verbose and this is where we can use the spaceship operator.

$smallPeople = [ 'Doc' , 'Grumpy' , 'Happy' , 'Sleepy' , 'Sneezy' , 'Dopey' , 'Bashful' ] ; usort ( $smallPeople , function ( $a , $b ) { return $a <= > $b ; } ) ; var_dump ( $smallPeople ) ;

The var_dump() results in both examples are the same. To solidify this concept, we could also use this operator to sort the array by the number of characters in each name.

$smallPeople = [ 'Doc' , 'Grumpy' , 'Happy' , 'Sleepy' , 'Sneezy' , 'Dopey' , 'Bashful' ] ; usort ( $smallPeople , function ( $a , $b ) { return strlen ( $a ) <= > strlen ( $b ) ; } ) ; var_dump ( $smallPeople ) ;

Would sort the array in this manner.

array ( 7 ) { [ 0 ] = > string ( 3 ) "Doc" [ 1 ] = > string ( 5 ) "Happy" [ 2 ] = > string ( 5 ) "Dopey" [ 3 ] = > string ( 6 ) "Grumpy" [ 4 ] = > string ( 6 ) "Sleepy" [ 5 ] = > string ( 6 ) "Sneezy" [ 6 ] = > string ( 7 ) "Bashful" }