README

AP\Caster is a high-performance PHP library designed to facilitate flexible and efficient data casting operations. It supports adaptive scalar casting, enum casting, and customizable casting strategies to ensure data integrity and type safety in your applications

Installation

composer require ap-lib/caster

Features

• Adaptive Scalar Casting: Automatically converts between scalar types (e.g., string to int) when appropriate.
• Enum Casting: Seamlessly casts values to PHP enums, ensuring valid enum instances.
• Customizable Casting Strategies: Extend or modify casting behavior by implementing custom casters.
• Error Handling: Provides detailed error information when casting operations fail.

Requirements

• PHP 8.3 or higher

Core Components

AP\Caster is built around a single interface: CasterInterface, which defines the contract for all casters.

By default, all casting-related errors extend AP\ErrorNode\Error, ensuring consistent error handling across different casters.

Getting started

Here's a quick example demonstrating how to use AP\Caster

Initialize the PrimaryCaster with desired casters

use AP\Caster\PrimaryCaster;
use AP\Caster\AdaptiveScalarCaster;
use AP\Caster\EnumCaster;

// 
$caster = new PrimaryCaster([
    new AdaptiveScalarCaster(),
    new EnumCaster(),
]);

Example 1: matching data type

$data = "hello world";
$result = $caster->cast("string", $data);

// $result = true
// $data = "hello world"

Example 2: adaptive scalar casting

// 
$data = "1200";
$result = $caster->cast("int", $data);

// $result = true
// $data = 1200

Example 2: enum casting

enum OneTwoThree: string
{
    case One   = 1;
    case Two   = 2;
    case Three = 3;
}

// Example 3: 
$data = 3;
$result = $caster->cast(OneTwoThreeExampleEnumInt::class, $data);

// $result = true
// $data = OneTwoThreeExampleEnumInt::Three

Example 4: handling casting errors

$data = ["hello" => "world"];
$result = $caster->cast("int", $data);

// IMPORTANT, a caster will never modify the original data if casting was unsuccessful
// $data = ["hello" => "world"]    
/* 
    result = [
      \AP\Caster\Error\UnexpectedType::__set_state([
         'message' => 'Unexpected date type, expected `int`, actual `array`',
         'path' => [],
         'expected' => 'int',
         'actual' => 'array',
      ]),
    ]
*/

if (is_array($result)) {
    // Handle errors
    foreach ($result as $error) {
        echo $error->message . PHP_EOL;
    }
}

// Output: Unexpected data type, expected `int`, actual `array`