John Davidson

Message:

Is there a type hint in PHP 8.3 which allows using ExampleClass[] for declaring it is an array of objects of the class ExampleClass?

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In my specific case, ExampleClass is called Task

What I want but does not work:

private Task[] $tasks;

My PHPStorm IDE tells me that Plural types are allowed only in doc types
- speaking that only in PHPDoc using Tasks[] would be totally fine. But I want to use plain PHP.

The error is:
PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected token "[", expecting variable

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If I would only need one object Task and not an array of objects Task[] it would work with:

private Task $task;

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This is my current, working workaround:

private array $tasks;

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My Answer:
No, as of PHP 8.3, there is no built-in type hint for an array of objects of a specific class. You can only use type hints for scalar types, arrays, callables, and objects.

You can achieve similar functionality by using a combination of type hints and PHPDoc comments. For example, you can use the following code:

php
/** @var Task[] $tasks */
private array $tasks;


This way, you can still provide type hinting information to your IDE and other developers, even though it is not a native PHP type hint.