v4.0.0 - 18 July 2026

[fivefilters]

What's Changed

Readability.php 4.0 is a ground-up rewrite: a fresh port of Mozilla's Readability.js v0.6.0 built on PHP 8.4's new DOM API and HTML parser. This is the first stable release of the 4.0 series and includes everything from v4.0.0-beta.1.

Highlights

• PHP 8.4+ with native WHATWG parsing — parsing and serialization use Dom\HTMLDocument (the spec-compliant Lexbor parser bundled with PHP), replacing HTML5-PHP and the legacy libxml path. No more entity workarounds (substituteEntities, summonCthulhu and friends are gone).
• Parity with Readability.js 0.6.0 — including lang and publishedTime output, maxElemsToParse, classesToPreserve, allowedVideoRegex, linkDensityModifier and debug options, and Readerable::isProbablyReaderable().
• New result API — parse() returns a readonly Article value object (title, content, textContent, excerpt, byline, siteName, dir, lang, publishedTime, image, images, …). Options are passed as named constructor arguments: new Readability(fixRelativeURLs: true).
• Real WHATWG URL resolution — relative URLs are fixed using PHP 8.5's native Uri\WhatWg\Url when available, with rowbot/url as the fallback on PHP 8.4, matching the new URL() behavior Readability.js relies on.
• Tested against Mozilla's own corpus — the test suite runs Mozilla's 130 test pages verbatim, with their structural DOM comparison ported to PHP.
• Broader dependency compatibility — constraints widened to psr/log ^1.0 || ^2.0 || ^3.0 and rowbot/url ^3.1.7 || ^4.0 so the library co-installs cleanly alongside a wider range of applications, with CI now also testing the lowest allowed versions (Widen dependency constraints for better co-installability #49).

Upgrading from 3.x

The API has changed — see UPGRADE.md for the full migration guide, and the CHANGELOG for the complete list of changes.

Upgrading from v4.0.0-beta.1

The only changes since beta.1 are the widened dependency constraints and lowest-deps CI coverage noted above — no code changes.

Full Changelog: v3.3.3...v4.0.0

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This discussion was created from the release v4.0.0 - 18 July 2026.