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PHP 7 Support Added To Our PHP PDF Library

By Minh Nguyen (Mitch) | 2018 Nov 16

We are happy to announce that we have added PHP 7 bindings to our PDF SDK through SWIG 3. This blog will outline some of the changes we made to our PHP PDF library so that it would support both PHP5/SWIG2 and PHP7/SWIG3.

APIs and Data Structures

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There are some major changes in APIs and data structures between PHP 5 and PHP 7. In order to support PHP 7, we have made some changes to PDFNetPHP.i and PDFNetUStringPHP.i in PDFNetPHP:

PHP 5:

//@data {"displayAs": ""}//
zval **data
Z_ARRVAL_PP, Z_TYPE_PP
zend_hash_get_current_data_ex(_,_,_)
ZVAL_STRINGL(_,_,_,_)

PHP 7:

//@data {"displayAs": ""}//
zval *data
Z_ARRVAL_P, Z_TYPE_P
zend_hash_get_current_data_ex(_,_)
ZVAL_STRINGL(_,_,_)

CMakeLists.txt

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We also made the following changes to CMakeLists.txt:

PHP 5:

//@data {"displayAs": ""}//
execute_process(
COMMAND ${SWIG_EXECUTABLE} -c++ -php -DNTS -DSWIGHIDDEN_SIG -I${PDFNetC_Include_Dir} -outdir ${PDFNetPHP_SourcesDir} -o ${PDFNetPHP_SourcesDir}/PDFNetPHP.cpp -oh ${PDFNetPHP_SourcesDir}/PDFNetPHP.hpp PDFNetPHP.i
)

PHP 7:

//@data {"displayAs": ""}//
execute_process(
COMMAND ${SWIG_EXECUTABLE} -c++ -php7 -DNTS -DSWIGHIDDEN_SIG -I${PDFNetC_Include_Dir} -outdir ${PDFNetPHP_SourcesDir} -o ${PDFNetPHP_SourcesDir}/PDFNetPHP.cpp -oh ${PDFNetPHP_SourcesDir}/PDFNetPHP.hpp PDFNetPHP.i
)

A Combined Solution

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Instead of having separate solutions for PHP 5 and PHP 7, we were able to combine them into a single build by using a php-config executable in CMake to obtain PHP package information:

//@data {"displayAs": ""}//
find_program(PHP_CONFIG_EXECUTABLE NAMES php-config7 php-config5 php-config4 php-config)
execute_process(
COMMAND
    ${PHP_CONFIG_EXECUTABLE} --vernum
    OUTPUT_STRIP_TRAILING_WHITESPACE
    COMMAND sed -ne "s/....$//p"
    OUTPUT_VARIABLE PHP_MAJOR_VERSION
)

Once PHP_MAJOR_VERSION is obtained, we can set the appropriate arguments on SWIG:

//@data {"displayAs": ""}//
if (PHP_MAJOR_VERSION LESS 7)
       set(php_version "php")
else()
       set(php_version "php7")
endif()
execute_process(
    COMMAND ${SWIG_EXECUTABLE} -c++ -${php_version} …
)

The next changes are using preprocessor directives in the interface files:

#if PHP_MAJOR_VERSION >= 7
...
#else
... 
#endif

For more information about setup instructions, please click here.

Conclusion

In this blog, we outlined how we added support for PHP 7 without the need for a separate configuration, while also ensuring seamless support for any newer PHP/SWIG versions. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us and we will be happy to help.