Re: Re: Programming general question

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 11:07 PM, Terion Miller <webdev.terion@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 3:54 AM, Ondrej Kulaty <kopyto911@gmail.com> wrote: >> Thanks for all the information, I was asking because I inherited thousands > of lines of code that had used mysql_fetch_object(), yet I kept getting so > many errors so I starting playing with changing them to mysql_fetch_assoc() > and things seem to work better, so I was wonder why sometimes data from a db > field can be used as an object or array, the arrays, objects, classes still > confuses me..oh add functions to that, is there a hiearchy? > If an object is not an ACTUAL class instance, then it's no more than a syntactic sugar array. For example: $user = new stdClass(); // General class name, used internally by PHP $user->username = 'John Doe', $user->email = 'john_doe@example.com'; $user->password = md5('some_hard_or_easy_password_string'); ... is almost typical to: $user = array(); $user['username'] = 'John Doe'; $user['email'] = 'john_doe@example.com'; $user['password'] = md5('some_hard_or_easy_password_string'); ... Many programmers particularly use objects for retrieving database results because they require less verbose than arrays: $result->username is just easier and less error-prone than $result['username']. Using objects as class instances is totally different than using arrays as many repliers have said. They're usually used, objects that is, within OOP (Object-Oriented Programming), which relies on the idea of thinking of programming in resemblance to real-world things (objects). Thinking in this paradigm is, again, totally different than traditional procedural programming, and requires a hard shift in the way you think about programming in general. I suggest consulting the manual sections on OOP (specially for PHP5), or other basic tutorials or books on this huge subject. Regards, Usamah