PHP anonymous curly braces?

Question

$test=1;
{
    $test=2;
}
var_dump($test);

The output of this is 2. I would have expected 1?

What is the point of these curly braces? Do they have some special usage, or it's just allowed syntax that doesn't cause parsing error?

Answer 1

PHP does not support variable scoping using braces (or any other syntax elements). They are just doing nothing in your example.