Migrating to a newer version of PHP

Question

I notice that a couple of weeks ago PHP 5.3 reached release candidate stage (woo!), but then seeing the list of already-deprecated functions finally being removed, that got me thinking about whether it would break any of my old code.

Short of doing a suck-it-and-see test (installing on a test server and trying it out), are there any sort of migration tools which can analyse your code to highlight issues? For example, if some scripts use the ereg_* functions.

Answer 1

Nothing beats installing on a test server and running your unit tests. You do have unit tests, right? ;)

Answer 2

One technique you could use is to take the list of deprecated functions that is being removed and grep for them. A little shell scripting fu goes a long way for things like this.

Let's suppose you have a file deprecated.txt with deprecated function names one per line:

for func in `cat deprecated.txt`
do
  grep -R $func /path/to/src
done

That will tell you all the instances of the deprecated functions you're using.