Nullable return types in PHP7

PHP 7 introduces return type declarations. Which means I can now indicate the return value is a certain class, interface, array, callable or one of the newly hintable scalar types, as is possible for function parameters.

function returnHello(): string {
    return 'hello';
}

Often it happens that a value is not always present, and that you might return either something of some type, or null. While you can make parameters nullable by setting their default to null (DateTime $time = null), there does not appear to be a way to do this for return types. Is that indeed the case, or am I somehow not finding how to do it? These do not work:

function returnHello(): string? {
    return 'hello';
}

function returnHello(): string|null {
    return 'hello';
}

3 Answers
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