Some Thing To Remember About PHP

I've been messing with PHP lately, and there's definitely been things to get used to. Here are some points to keep in mind if you have a history with out high-level languages:

• PHP is object oriented, but the API is still largely function-based. So, getting the size of an array is done with count($array) and not $array.length. Functions, functions, functions...but much of the time it's probably preferable.
  
  
• Regular expressions aren't native. Bah. So, use preg_match("/myregexp/", $string) rather than $string =~ /myregexp/. Dissapointing. Also, why the preg? It reads pregnant to me.
  
  
• Instead of $string.split(), use explode($string). And, since we're using so many functions, you have to remember argument order too. And, no, it's not explode($string, $separator) -- it's the opposite. If you get back your separator, you did it the wrong way. :-)
  
  
• PHP has simpler methods for most everything as compared to, say, Ruby. So, it's simple to create directories with functions like mkdir($path). You can even call it as @mkdir($path) to suppress duplicate directory warnings. As opposed to Ruby, where you have to actually wrap that statement in a begin/rescue.
  
  
• Here's my biggest obstacle: The string concatenation operator is dot (.), not plus (+). This gets me a lot, though I'm getting used to it now. It once caused me a few hours of debugging when I was converting a Java program to PHP. In my mind, I convince myself it's better -- less ambiguous with mathematical addition -- but, since every other language uses plus...it gets me.