Last autumn, I was talking about how I would like to see pdo_pgsql for PHP to be improved.
Over the last few days I had time to seriously start looking into making sure I get my wish. Even though my C is very rusty and I have next to no experience in dealing with the PHP/Zend API, I made quite a bit of progress over the last few days.
First, JSON support
If you have the json extension enabled in your PHP install (it’s enabled by default), then any column of data type json will be automatically parsed and returned to you as an array.
No need to constantly repeat yourself with json_parse(). This works, of course, with directly selected json columns or with any expression that returns json (like array_to_json or the direct typecast shown in the screenshot).
This is off by default and can be enabled on a per-connection or a per-statement level as to not break backwards compatibility (I’ll need it off until I get a chance to clean up PopScan for example).
Next, array support:
Just like with JSON, this will automatically turn any array expression (of the built-in array types) into an array to use from PHP.
As I’m writing this blog entry here, this only works for text[] and it’s always enabled.
Once I have an elegant way to deal with the various types of arrays and convert them into the correct PHP types, I’ll work on making this turnoffable (technical term) too.
I’ll probably combine this and the automatic JSON parsing into just one setting which will include various extended data types both Postgres and PHP know about.
Once I’ve done that, I’ll look into more points on my wishlist (better error reporting with 9.3 and later and a way to quote identifiers comes to mind) and then I’ll probably try to write a proper RFC and propose this for inclusion into PHP itself (though don’t get your hopes up – they are a conservative bunch).
If you want to follow along with my work, have a look at my pdo_pgsql-improvements branch on github (tracks to PHP-5.5)
gnegg 