Along with the above mentioned additions, a variety of new functions and additional methods to existing classes have been added.
Classes now support the Class::{expr}() syntax. Now you can accomplish something like the following for static calls:

class Test
{
 public static function parseH4()
 {
 echo "H4 Parsed";
 }

 public static function parseH2()
 {
 echo "H2 Parsed";
 }

}

$t = new Test;
$method_prefix = "parse";

$t::{$method_prefix . "h4"}();
$t::{$method_prefix . "h2"}();

Although not a very creative use of the idea, the real power of the above will manifest itself when using dynamic method calls. Along with the support for expressions while calling static class methods, class member access on instantiation has also been added, as shown below.

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The CLI SAPI provides a built-in web server for development purposes – extremely helpful to quickly start  testing your php pages. Just enter the following on the command line and you are ready to go.

The server will now be listening to your requests on port 8000.

php -S localhost:8000

Which will display the following:

PHP 5.4.0 Development Server started at Fri Apr 06 13:56:26 2012

Listening on localhost:8000

Document root is C:\php-5.4.0

Press Ctrl-C to quit.

Of course don’t expect something along the lines of Apache or IIS. This is a small built-in service that lets you quickly check your pages. Absolutely not recommended to use on a production basis.

PHP now supports array dereferencing directly from a function call.
Prior to version 5.4 you had to store the returning value from a function into a variable, and then use the variable.
The most frequent uses will be when using ‘preg_match’ or ‘explode’ kind of functions, functions that return an array. So instead of the following:

$data  = "piece1 piece2 piece3 piece4";
$pieces = explode(" ", $data);
echo $pieces[0]; // piece1
echo $pieces[1]; // piece2

We could instead shorten this to:

$data  = "piece1 piece2 piece3 piece4";
echo explode(" ", $data)[0];

Another example using the ‘getdate()’ function.

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