In his latest post Stanislav Malyshev looks at a RFC he's proposed to allow array keys to be objects including some of his thoughts behind the proposal and how he sees it being helpful to the language.

I’m going to put to vote soon another of my RFCs, namely one about “objects as keys“. So, I want to outline the case for it here and address some criticisms and questions raised while discussing it.

He starts off by answering the "why" question, mentioning specially the introduction of things like GMP numbers and how, despite them seeming to work like numbers, other things can be done with them. He talks about how you'd use this functionality "the right way" and how that'd relate back to value objects. He answers a few other questions about the proposal including why it's better than just using __toString or spl_object_hash instead. He spends the rest of the post looking at some of the implementation problems, disadvantages and some of the possible names (function names) for the handling.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post by Taylor Ren looks at big numbers in PHP and the functionality it has to handle arbitrary precision via three modules - GMP. BC Math and php-bignumbers.

In this article, we will review the PHP capability to provide arbitrary precision number calculation / big integer calculation by reviewing 3 PHP modules: GMP, BC Math and php-bignumbers. We will demonstrate two real-world examples to see the powers/limitations of each. The first one will be calculating PI to arbitrary precision – well, for the sake of the article, we will restrict the precision, say, to 1000 digits; the second will be a simple demonstration on RSA encryption/decryption.

He briefly looks at how to get the tools installed (via at-get or Composer) and a sample script to ensure that they're all included correctly and working. He includes a comparison between the three libraries, listing both strengths and weaknesses relative to the others. He then gets a bit more in-depth and shows how to calculate PI with each option (code is on GitHub) and the results of the benchmarking. He also includes a second example of calculating the RSA algorithm based on their process.

In a recent post Marcus Bointon looks at a hashing method that's not one as commonly used by developers as the usual base64 - base-62 encoding that plays a bit nicer with things like URLs and emails due to the character set it allows.

There's a really horrible bug (though they won't call it that!) in Apache's mod_rewrite that means that urlencoded inputs in rewrites get unescaped in their transformation to output patterns. The bug actually remains unfixed, though a workaround first appeared in Apache 2.2.12. [...] Base-62 is interesting as it can be made safe for use in URLs, DNS, email addresses and pathnames, unlike any available encoding of base-64, as it only includes [0-9A-Za-z].

He originally wrote his own parser, but notes that now the BCMath and gmp extensions make it much simpler, just a call to gmp_strval with gmp_init. This method works, but it's still not quite all he wanted so he created his own encoder to do the job.

In an effort to just about everything he can with PHP Mark Karpeles has posted an article about how he created a SSH server in PHP with most (not quite all) of the functionality of some of its counterparts.

You probably know SSH at least by its name. It’s a of secure telnet replacement which also allows many other things such as port forwarding, remote file management (with sftp) and more. With PHP I could write a fully working SSH server in only 3 days. [...] My goal when writing this was to provide a replacement for the FTP protocol for the customers of my hosting service.

He lists the extensions used to create the extension - OpenSSL, mcrypt, hash and (the most important) GMP as well as a link to the source if you'd like to try it out yourself.