 <p>As @ivoba stated there is no native expression handling of bitwise operators for the symfony parameters.xml services.xml files or their yml equivalents.</p> <p>For others looking for a method to handle special parameters, one method is that you can use a <code>CompilerPassInterface</code> to process the parameter values for you, then add the CompilerPass to your Bundle's build method, this way your container will build and cache the SoapClient.</p> <p>Below demonstrates adding the SoapClient as an extension, allowing you to use it from a specific Bundle that can be included in other Applications. Alternatively <code>services.xml</code> can be ported to the global <code>/app/config/services.xml</code> file and the compiler can be included in a desired Bundle build method.</p> <p><strong>Define the CompilerPass</strong></p> <pre><code>//src/AppBundle/DependencyInjection/Compiler/SoapServicePass.php namespace AppBundle\DependencyInjection\Compiler; use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Compiler\CompilerPassInterface; use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\ContainerBuilder; class SoapServicePass extends CompilerPassInterface { public function process(ContainerBuilder $container) { if ($container-&gt;hasParameter('soap.compression')) { $compression = $container-&gt;getParameter('soap.compression'); if (true === is_array($compression)) { //easy way to bitwise OR an array of integer values and return 0 $compression = array_reduce($compression, function ($a, $b) { return $a | $b; }, 0); } if (false === is_int($compression)) { //validation to ensure an integer value is received throw new \InvalidArgumentException('soap.compression parameter must be an integer or an array of integer values to apply bitwise OR on'); } $container-&gt;setParameter('soap.compression', $compression); } //... } //... } </code></pre> <p><strong>Define the Extension</strong></p> <pre><code>//src/AppBundle/DependencyInjection/SoapExtension.php namespace AppBundle\DependencyInjection; use Symfony\Component\Config\FileLocator; use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\ContainerBuilder; use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\Loader\XmlFileLoader; use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\DependencyInjection\Extension; class SoapExtension extends Extension { public function load(array $configs, ContainerBuilder $container) { $loader = new XmlFileLoader($container, new FileLocator(__DIR__ . '/../Resources/config')); $loader-&gt;load('services.xml'); } } </code></pre> <p><strong>Define the Service</strong></p> <pre class="lang-xml prettyprint-override"><code>&lt;!-- src/AppBundle/Resources/config/services.xml --&gt; &lt;?xml version="1.0" ?&gt; &lt;container xmlns="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services http://symfony.com/schema/dic/services/services-1.0.xsd"&gt; &lt;parameters&gt; &lt;parameter key="soap.compression" type="collection"&gt; &lt;parameter type="constant"&gt;SOAP_COMPRESSION_ACCEPT&lt;/parameter&gt; &lt;parameter type="constant"&gt;SOAP_COMPRESSION_GZIP&lt;/parameter&gt; &lt;/parameter&gt; &lt;parameter key="soap.options" type="collection"&gt; &lt;parameter key="compression"&gt;%soap.compression%&lt;/parameter&gt; &lt;/parameter&gt; &lt;/parameters&gt; &lt;services&gt; &lt;service id="soap_client" class="SoapClient"&gt; &lt;argument/&gt; &lt;argument&gt;%soap.options%&lt;/argument&gt; &lt;/service&gt; &lt;/services&gt; &lt;/container&gt; </code></pre> <p><strong>Include the Extension and CompilerPass in your bundle</strong></p> <pre><code>//src/AppBundle/AppBundle.php namespace AppBundle; use Symfony\Component\DependencyInjection\ContainerBuilder; use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Bundle\Bundle; use AppBundle\DependencyInjection\Compiler\SoapServicePass; use AppBundle\DependencyInjection\SoapExtension; class AppBundle extends Bundle { public function build(ContainerBuilder $container) { $container-&gt;addCompilerPass(new SoapServicePass); //... } public function getContainerExtension() { return new SoapExtension; } //... } </code></pre> <p><strong>Container Results:</strong></p> <pre><code>/** * Gets the 'soap_client' service. * * This service is shared. * This method always returns the same instance of the service. * * @return \SoapClient A SoapClient instance */ protected function getSoapClientService() { return $this-&gt;services['soap_client'] = new \SoapClient('', array('compression' =&gt; 32)); } </code></pre>