Question
The following code was executed.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | <?phpclass MyClass { private$foo="bar";} $myObject=new MyClass();echo$myObject; |
Which produced the following error.
1 2 3 4 | Catchable fatal error: Object of class MyClass could not be converted to string in test.php on line 7
Call Stack:
0.0011 323736 1. {main}() /test.php:0 |
How can the code be simply changed to prevent this error and produce some form of result?
Answer
The easiest way to rewrite this code and to actually print out the object properly is to use the __toString() magic method. This method must return a string and is automatically called an object is printed out. The example code can therefore be rewritten like this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 | <?phpclass MyClass { private$foo="bar"; publicfunction __toString(){ return$this->foo; }} $myObject=new MyClass();echo$myObject; |
This stops the error occuring and will produce the output below.
barThe __toString() function is useful for both debug purposes but also for decorating output. For example, we could have a User class that would print out the user's information, and a HtmlUser decorator class that prints out the user's information with surrounding HTML tags. This would be written like this:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 | <?phpclass User { public$_username; public$_forename; public$_surname; public$_created; publicfunction __construct(){ $this->_username ='user1'; $this->_forename ='John'; $this->_surname ='Doe'; $this->_created =time(); } publicfunction __toString(){ $output=''; $output.="Username = ".$this->_username ."\n"; $output.="Forename = ".$this->_forename ."\n"; $output.="Surname = ".$this->_surname ."\n"; $output.="Created = ".$this->_created ."\n"; return$output; } } class HtmlUser { protected$user; publicfunction __construct(User $user){ $this->user=$user; } publicfunction __toString(){ $output="<ul>\n"; $output.="\t<li><strong>Username</strong> ".$this->user->_username ."</li>\n"; $output.="\t<li><strong>Forename</strong> ".$this->user->_forename ."</li>\n"; $output.="\t<li><strong>Surname</strong> ".$this->user->_surname ."</li>\n"; $output.="\t<li><strong>Created</strong> ".$this->user->_created ."</li>\n"; $output.="</ul>"; return$output; } } $user=new User();$htmlUser=new HtmlUser($user);echo$htmlUser; |
This produces the following output:
1 2 3 4 5 6 | <ul> <li><strong>Username</strong> user1</li> <li><strong>Forename</strong> John</li> <li><strong>Surname</strong> Doe</li> <li><strong>Created</strong>1304196043</li></ul> |