Method naming oddness

Intro

Yesterday I got a new Macbook Pro w/ retina display and while I was 'moving into' it last night I noticed that it shipped with PHP Version 5.3.15. For several months I've been meaning to checkout some features that shipped with PHP 5.4 and I figured that this would be the perfect time to upgrade.

After going to the PHP download page I noticed that the latest version of PHP is currently 5.5.0. A couple of stackoverflow threads pointed to this package as the easiest way to upgrade my PHP version.

The upgrade was straight forward and painless and I am now running PHP version 5.5.0.

You said something about oddness?

Oh yes I did didn't I? Well I noticed that if you create a class with a method name that is the same as the class and no constructor function then the method with the same name as the class will get called when the object is constructed.

Let's look at some code to make it clearer.

Code Example

<?php
// example without constructor
class Base{
  public function base(){
    echo 'I was called!!!';
  }
}

$base = new Base();
// echos 'I was called!!!'
?>

It's easy to make it fail and to confirm that this is happening. Here we change the function name to ase.

<?php
// example without constructor
class Base{
  public function ase(){
    echo 'I was called!!!';
  }
}

$base = new Base();
// echos nothing
?>

Finally you can override this behavior by supplying a constructor method.

<?php
// example with constructor
class Base{
  public function __construct(){
    echo 'constructor called';
  }
  public function base(){
    echo 'I was called!!!';
  }
}

$base = new Base();
// echos 'constructor called'
?>

Summary

Ok I admit it's not the oddest behavior in the world. But it took me a minute to debug exactly what was happening because my real world example Classes had many more methods.

Obviously I can see this bug being annoying in cases like above where you have no need of a constructor method but you accidentally have a poorly named method in your class.

Published

Tags

• php 3
• code 21