Introducing Piper: a pipe operator-first PHP utility library

When I experimented with Elixir a few years ago, I fell in love with the pipe operator |>. Since then, I’ve always dreamt of a similar tool in PHP.

Last year, we finally got it! Unfortunately, the standard array & string manipulation functions in PHP aren’t exactly known for their API consistency, which makes the pipe operator awkward to use.

I ported Laravel’s excellent collection & string helpers to a pipe operator-optimized API. Piper is an attempt to wrap the standard library to make it compatible with the pipe operator.

use function Spatie\Piper\Arr\{filter, join, map};
use function Spatie\Piper\Str\{prefix, suffix};

[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
    |> filter(fn (int $i) => $i % 2 === 0)
    |> map(fn (int $i) => pow($i, 2))
    |> join(', ', ', and ')
    |> prefix('The winning numbers are ')
    |> suffix('.');

// "The winning numbers are 4, 16, and 36."

I wrote a technical introduction to the package on the Spatie blog. Documentation can be referenced here, and the repository is hosted on GitHub.

The sad part (maybe?)

I’ve never seen a coding agent return code using a pipe operator unless I’ve explicitly asked it to. That makes sense: the models we use are trained on years of historical data, and the pipe operator is a fairly new feature.

I might never use this library. I might never use the pipe operator at all. Agentic coding is pushing syntax to a standstill. New programming APIs that bring benefits to execution will be pushed forward. But the whole fight for making code look good seems to have been extinguished as AI is slowly moving us to focus on outcomes more than line-by-line code cleanliness. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but part of our craft might get lost along the way.

Ironically, I convinced myself to actually write this because I have AI at my disposal. Manually porting 234 functions and a full test suite is not something I was looking forward to. Instead, the time spent building and refining this package is measurable in hours.

Either way, this is a fun experiment to conduct. And I look forward to tinkering further and giving it a shot in some real projects.