What is the purpose of the question marks before type declaration in PHP7 (?string or ?int)?

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What is a Nullable Type?

Introduced in PHP 7.1,

Type declarations for parameters and return values can now be marked as nullable by prefixing the type name with a question mark. This signifies that as well as the specified type, NULL can be passed as an argument, or returned as a value, respectively.

In parameters

function test(?string $parameter1, string $parameter2) {
    var_dump($parameter1, $parameter2);
}

test("foo", "bar");
test(null, "foo");
test("foo", null); // Uncaught TypeError: Argument 2 passed to test() must be of the type string, null given,

With variadic arguments

In this example, you can pass null or string parameters :

function acceptOnlyStrings(string ...$parameters) { }
function acceptStringsAndNull(?string ...$parameters) { }

acceptOnlyStrings('foo', null, 'baz'); // Uncaught TypeError: Argument #2 must be of type string, null given
acceptStringsAndNull('foo', null, 'baz'); // OK

Return type

The return type of a function can also be a nullable type, and allows to return null or the specified type.

function error_func(): int {
    return null ; // Uncaught TypeError: Return value must be of the type integer
}

function valid_func(): ?int {
    return null ; // OK
}

function valid_int_func(): ?int {
    return 2 ; // OK
}

Property type (as of PHP 7.4)

The type of a property can be a nullable type.

class Foo
{
    private object $foo = null; // ERROR : cannot be null
    private ?object $bar = null; // OK : can be null (nullable type)
    private object $baz; // OK : uninitialized value
}

See also :

Nullable union types (as of PHP 8.0)

As of PHP 8, “?T notation is considered a shorthand for the common case of T|null“

class Foo
{
    private ?object $bar = null; // as of PHP 7.1+
    private object|null $baz = null; // as of PHP 8.0
}

Error

In case of the running PHP version is lower than PHP 7.1, a syntax error is thrown:

syntax error, unexpected ‘?’, expecting variable (T_VARIABLE)

The ? operator should be removed.

PHP 7.1+

function foo(?int $value) { }

PHP 7.0 or lower

/** 
 * @var int|null 
 */
function foo($value) { }

References

As of PHP 7.1: Nullable type :

As of PHP 7.4: Class properties type declarations.

As of PHP 8.0: Nullable Union Type

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