RE: [PHP-DEV] Re: [VOTE] Userspace operator overloading

On Thursday, March 26, 2020 3:50 AM Jakob Givoni <jakob@givoni.dk> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 6:28 AM Christoph M. Becker <cmbecker69@gmx.de> wrote: > >> It seems to me that the RFC is not sufficiently specific enough >> regarding the concatenation of instances of classes which implement >> __toString(). > > Exactly what I was thinking too. Would be nice with some examples on this. I am not sure if I can (or should) still add this to the RFC, here some clarification on this: The overloaded concat operator has higher priority than the __toString() method. So if Class A overloades the concat operator, then calling $a . $b means ClassA::__concat($a, $b); (Note that both operands are passed in their original form) If you want to concat the string representations, you will have to explicitly convert the objects to strings: $ret = (string) $a . (string) $b; If the concat operator is not overloaded, the behavior is like now, and the objects are converted implicitly to strings (so $a . $b actually means (string) $a . (string) $b). Furthermore an notice is triggered, hinting the user that he could overload the concat operator. (Maybe here a different message than for the other operators would be useful).