Export arrays as [] instead of array() in var_export

[AJK-Muc]

Description

PHP can use $a = [] instead of $a = array() for very long, var_export() does not unfortunately. Please make it possible. Thanks.

[LamentXU123]

PHP can use $a = [] instead of $a = array() for very long, var_export() does not unfortunately. Please make it possible. Thanks.

Try this:

use Symfony\Component\VarExporter\VarExporter;

$data = ['a' => 1, 'b' => ['c' => 2]];
echo VarExporter::export($data); 
// Outputs: ['a' => 1, 'b' => ['c' => 2]]

If you want to use this in a standardized php environment, I'd suggest to have a RFC on this. Just for instance that for json_encode, we already has a JSON_PRETTY_PRINT flag to print things out prettily before, and therefore it make sense to me that we could add something like VAR_EXPORT_SHORT_ARRAY or a similar flag to var_export.

[AJK-Muc]

Thanks for mentioning your alternative, but before I have to use a framework for such easy tasks, I'll ask some AI to reformat the output or write some lines of code by myself. I also thought it would be not very difficult to extend the export with a flag like you mentioned, but sometimes we simply expect too much ;) These days we're so used to simply copy and paste that we might forget how difficult the daily tasks of the core-devs for PHP actually might be. Never mind, maybe sometimes in the future this function reflect "modern" syntax.