The PHP-CPP library is a C++ library for developing PHP extensions. It offers a collection of well documented and easy-to-use classes that can be used and extended to build native extensions for PHP. The full documentation can be found on http://www.php-cpp.com.
PHP-CPP is created and maintained by Copernica (www.copernica.com). We write our code mostly in PHP and C++ and needed an effective way to combine these two languages. That's where PHP-CPP comes in. Do you appreciate our work and are you looking for other high quality solutions?
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Unlike regular PHP extensions - which are really hard to implement and require a deep knowledge of the Zend engine and pointer manipulation - extensions built with PHP-CPP are not difficult to develop at all. In fact, the only thing you need to do is write a function in C++, and the PHP-CPP library uses all the power offered by C++11 to convert the parameters and return values from your functions to/and from PHP:
Php::Value hello_world()
{
return "hello world!";
}
The function above is a native C++ function. With PHP-CPP you can export this function to PHP with only one single C++ method call:
extension.add("hello_world", hello_world);
Working with parameters and return values is just as easy:
Php::Value my_plus(Php::Parameters ¶ms)
{
return params[0] + params[1];
}
The method call to export the above C++ function:
extension.add<my_plus>("my_plus", {
Php::ByVal("a", Php::numericType),
Php::ByVal("b", Php::numericType)
});
The PHP-CPP library ensures that the variables from PHP (which internally are complicated C structures), are automatically converted into integers, passed to your function, and that the return value of your "my_plus" function is also converted back into a PHP variable.
Type conversion between native C/C++ types and PHP variables is handled by PHP-CPP, using features from the C++11 language. It does not matter if your functions accept strings, integers, booleans or other native parameters: PHP-CPP takes care of the conversion. The return value of your function is also transformed by PHP-CPP into PHP.
More complicated structures can be handled by PHP-CPP as well. If you would like to return a nested associative array from your function, you can do so too:
Php::Value get_complex_array()
{
Php::Value r;
r["a"] = 123;
r["b"] = 456;
r["c"][0] = "nested value";
r["c"][1] = "example";
return r;
}
The C++ function above is equivalent to the following function in PHP:
function get_complex_array()
{
return array(
"a" => 123,
"b" => 456,
"c" => array("nested_value","example")
);
}
More information and more examples are available on the official website: http://www.php-cpp.com.