declare statement is not scoped when using curly braces

[dingo-d]

Description

When writing tests for phpcs sniff using some useful helpers regarding declare statements, I came up with an unusual behavior of the declare statements, when braces are used.

I was testing out a code that looked like this:

<?php
declare(strict_types=1)
echo 'hi!';

{
// Code.
}

that threw a fatal error because you cannot use curly braces with strict_types directive or alternative control structure syntax (declare: ... enddeclare;)

So I tried to see what will happen if I use a directive that allows the use of curly braces, like encoding. So I tried:

<?php

declare(encoding='ISO-8859-15')
echo 'aäaß' . "\n";

{
echo 'aäaß' . "\n";

}

And I got out:

aÀaÃ
aÀaÃ

I thought I'd get a parse error like when you omit the : when using if with endif; statement. Although, when testing the if statement with the curly braces, like in the example above, I can also see the echoed value before the condition, so I guess that's kinda expected.

What was a buggy behavior was this:

<?php

declare(encoding='ISO-8859-15') {
    echo 'aäaß' . "\n";
}

echo 'aäaß' . "\n";

I expected to see

aÀaÃ
aäaß

But I got (again)

aÀaÃ
aÀaÃ

So it seems that the declare statement, no matter if we are using curly braces, or alternative control structure syntax, will be applied throughout the file, instead of being scoped.

PHP Version

PHP 7.4.26

Operating System

Ubuntu 20.04 (on WSL)

[cmb69]

Both declare(encoding) snippets are equivalent; if declare() supports a block, that block is actually a statement (like with other control structures). Other than that, at least as it is implemented, declare(encoding) does not only work for the block/statement, but rather until another declare(encoding) statement is parsed, e.g.

<?php

declare(encoding='ISO-8859-15') {
    echo 'aäaß' . "\n";
}

declare(encoding='UTF-8');
echo 'aäaß' . "\n";

I'd re-classify that as doc issue, but since it makes no sense to support a block/statement for declare(encoding) at all, if it is "ignored", I'm not really sure what to do here.

[dingo-d]

For the above example on PHP 7.4 I'm getting

PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ''aäaß'' (T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING) in /home/dzoljom/testinginigng/test.php on line 7

And on PHP 8.1

PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected single-quoted string "aäaß" in /home/dzoljom/testinginigng/test.php on line 7

[cmb69]

That example is supposed to be encoded as ISO-8859-15 (or some other Latin1 encoding).

PS: please ignore PHP 7.4, since that version is no longer actively supported anyway.