Re: Class Constant PHP 5

The point was more that the constant's value is 'defined' at the beginning of the script, and is constant and non changing throughout the entire execution of the script. But I was looking for a way to give it a namespace inside a class rather than just defining in in the global scope so that I do not have to worry about conflicting names with other packages such as PEAR et al. I wanted to do something like: <? define('ClassName::ConstantName',$valueDeterminedAtStartOfScript); ?> so that I I could later use the notation $value = ClassName::ConstantName or from within the class $value = self::ConstantName and ensure other developers could not change the value of the constant. To achieve the result I want I could do: <? define ('foo',$valueDeterminedAtStartOfScript); class ClassName { const ConstantName = foo; } ?> But that just seems pointless and messy. I will assume that the simple answer to my original question was 'No that it is not possible'. Thanks - Jeff Jeffrey Sambells cell 519.897.2552 phone 905.878.4701 web http://www.sambells.info On 7-Dec-05, at 1:22 PM, Jay Blanchard wrote:

[snip] is there a way to dynamically define a class constant during runtime in PHP 5? for example I would like to achieve the result of something like: class Example { const FOO = bar(); } However this would obviously give a parse error. I know it is possible with variables but I would like it to be a constant. [/snip] Well, first of all the syntax you describe above does not define a constant at all, you would need to use define() The second thing is good old basic OOP theory, you should declare a private static variable http://us3.php.net/private http://us3.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.static.php Of course you could define a global constant and then pass it into your object when instantiating it, but that is a bad idea generally. Thirdly, you could never use a function to derive your constant value...it would then be an oxymoron. If the value generated by the function bar() changes, FOO is a variable. Constants are for simple values. For instance, we can all agree that pi is 3.14159 (to 5 decimal places, so defining a constant pi makes sense; define("PI", 3.14159); If we do not know what the outcome of a function will be it makes the value of the outcome a variable, always. It would be foolish (and would fail anyhow) to do something like this; define("RANDOM", rand(5,12));