Making ExcelBook::save() atomic is easy to describe. Write the workbook to a temporary file, then rename it into place. A save that dies halfway leaves the original file untouched. The obvious way to build that staged file is to ask LibXL for the finished archive as one buffer and write the buffer out. It works. It also costs 67.7 MB of peak RSS on a 3.3 MB workbook, and the PHP-side copy counts against memory_limit. The streaming writer php_excel used before the staging work costs 0.7 MB for the same file. That is roughly twenty times the workbook size in RAM, spent by a change whose whole purpose was safety. That one arrived and was fixed inside the same release window, so no published version carries it. It is still a fair summary of the last two weeks. Nine of my PHP extensions released today. Between them they add one new method, one set of interfaces, and a few error constants. Everything else is a bug fixed, a value rejected, a limit enforced, or a cost paid back down. The previous roundup...

Parse Malcolm X with almost any name splitter and you get a suffix. X looks like a roman numeral, roman numerals are suffixes (John III, Henry VIII), so X becomes the suffix and the surname disappears. That's the kind of bug you only find once you already have a working parser, because it isn't a missing rule. It's two correct rules wanting the same token. Last month I wrote about the casing fix in nameparser: the idea that a parser reading Jane Doe DDS should keep Doe as the surname and DDS as a credential, using letter casing as the signal that lowercasing throws away. Version 1.3.0 is the follow-up, and it is almost entirely about collisions like Malcolm X: tokens that two disambiguation rules both claim. nameparser is a maintained fork of the dormant theiconic/name-parser, by way of codebyzach/name-parser's PHP 8.3+ modernization; the contribution here is the casing and credential layer plus a confidence pass, not the parser core. The credential that is also a name JO ANDERSO...

ExcelBook::save() to a file:// path used to truncate your existing file before it finished writing the new one. If the write was short or got interrupted, you were left with neither the old file nor a complete new one. php_excel 2.4.0 fixes that: the write goes to a temp file and renames into place, so a failed save leaves your original intact. That fix doesn't make a good changelog headline. It's also most of what shipped across seven of my PHP extensions in the last month. Some of it is new capability, a new Markdown engine, twelve more chart types, a columnar serializer, native JSON columns in ClickHouse. Most of it is the other kind of work: rejecting a bad value instead of storing it, throwing on the untrusted path instead of trusting it, failing a write cleanly instead of half-committing it. This is the second roundup in the series; the June one covered the version-floor drops. Here is what landed since. mdparser 0.4.3: a new engine under the same API mdparser swapped its entire parsing backe...

A while back a proposal landed on the PHP internals list: deprecate metaphone(). My first reaction was the reflex of someone who has spent years as a PHP release master. Leave the old string functions alone, people depend on them, deprecation churn is its own tax. I was ready to argue against it. Then I read the reasoning and went looking at what phonetic name matching is actually supposed to do in 2026. I changed my mind. metaphone() should go. What surprised me was not that the function is dated. It was how far the field had moved while PHP core stood still, and how weak the replacement path the RFC points at really is. So I built the replacement I wish it had recommended. metaphone() is the oldest, least accurate version of an idea that kept evolving The RFC is right, and here is the short version of why. The metaphone() in core is the original 1990 algorithm: English-only, single-key, tuned for one accent of one language. It was superseded twice. First by Double Metaphone (Lawrence Philips, 2...

Here is a bug in a name-parsing library I use at work: // theiconic/name-parser $name = $parser->parse('Jane Doe DDS'); $name->getLastname(); // "Dds" $name->getMiddlename(); // "Doe" The dental credential is now her last name. The real surname got shoved into the middle-name field. Every row with a trailing credential and no comma had some version of this, and in a list of clinicians that is most of them. The library is theiconic/name-parser, a small, genuinely useful PHP package that splits a full-name string into salutation, first name, initials, last name, suffix, and nickname. I use it at work. It does the boring parts well. But the upstream repo went quiet around 2020, and bugs like the one above never got fixed. So I forked it. Today I'm releasing iliaal/nameparser, a maintained fork that fixes the credential handling, adds a confidence signal for the cases it genuinely can't decide, and targets PHP 8.3+. Most of the fix is unglamorous boundary work. One part of it rests on a single ide...