overwriting basic count function in laravel globally

Question

We are upgrading our laravel project, and it includes a language upgrade from php7 to php8. Consider this code:

$a = new stdClass()
count($a)

Will result in:

// php7
==> 1

// php8
==> TypeError  count(): Argument #1 ($value) must be of type Countable|array

Now our app is pretty big, there are a lot of small bits and pieces to it, and count was used in many places on things that it probably shouldn't have been used. I covered most of the ground, but ideally I'd like to have some kind of fallback. Is there a way to globally override the built in count function within the laravel application, hopefully to do something like this :

// very general pseudocode
function newCount($foo) { 
    try {
        return count($foo); 
    } except {
        \Log::warning('used count on non Countable|array')
        return 1;
    }
}

Then bind it somehow so:

// anywhere in the app code
count($a) // ==> will call newCount($a) instead

Answer 1

You have a multiple approaches to achieve this, using some third-party extension, one approach will be using uopz which allow you to hook into a predefined function and edit it's behavior.

the other method is to use some static code analyzer - something like PHPStan - or any other alternative, to scan & update your code easily.