PHP 5.5

Other changes to extensions

The intl extension now requires ICU 4.0 or later.

Changes in extension behavior, and new features:

pdo_mysql - Removed support for linking with MySQL client libraries older than 4.1

The MySQL extensions mysql, mysqli and PDO_mysql use mysqlnd as the default library now. It is still possible to use libmysqlclient by specifying a path to the configure options.

The following extensions can no longer be disabled during build configuration:

Changes in extension behaviour, and new features:

Date and Time - The TZ environment variable is no longer used to guess the timezone
cURL - cURL now supports SSH
Network - dns_check_record() now returns an extra "entries" index, containing the TXT elements.
Hash - The SHA-224 and salsa hash algorithms are now supported.
mbstring - Now supports CP850 encoding.
OCI8 - A call to oci_close() on a persistent connection, or a variable referencing a persistent connection going out of scope, will now roll back any uncommitted transaction. To avoid unexpected behavior, explicitly issue a commit or roll back as needed. The old behavior can be enabled with the INI directive oci8.old_oci_close_semantics. Database Resident Connection Pooling (DRCP) and Fast Application Notification (FAN) are now supported. Oracle External Authentication is now supported (except on Windows). The oci_bind_by_name() function now supports SQLT_AFC (aka the CHAR datatype).
OpenSSL - OpenSSL digest and cipher functions are now supported. It is also now possible to access the internal values of DSA, RSA and DH keys.
Session - Sessions will no longer store session-files in "/tmp" when open_basedir restrictions apply, unless "/tmp" is explicitly added to the list of allowed paths.
SOAP Now supports sending user supplied HTTP headers.
MySQLi Now supports persistent connections, by prepending the hostname with "p:".
Image Processing and GD The "JPG Support" index returned from gd_info() has been renamed to "JPEG Support".