Re: Re: [ZEND-ENGINE-CVS] cvs: ZendEngine2 / zend_API.c

On 2003/12/01, at 19:39, Andi Gutmans wrote:

At 12:50 AM 12/1/2003 -0500, Adam Maccabee Trachtenberg wrote:

On Sun, 30 Nov 2003, Andi Gutmans wrote:

At 11:59 AM 11/28/2003 -0500, Adam Maccabee Trachtenberg wrote:

As far as I'm concerned, if you don't want your object to be auomatically cast to a string, you shouldn't provide a __toString() method.

Wrong. __toString() isn't supposed to work in every case the engine

expects

a string. You'd probably also want $obj[3] to work as a string offset? In this case, maybe we should rename __toString to __toPrintable,

because I

think Marcus' patch is asking for trouble.

Maybe I'm the one who is confused. What's the point of having a magic __toString() method (or __toPrintable()) if it doesn't let the object pretend it's a string? You're saying it's okay to do: class foo {

    public function __toString() {
        return "foo";
    }

} $obj = new foo; print $foo; But not: print htmlentities($foo); That makes absolutely no sense to me. What if __toString() returns characters that need encoding? Or if I want to do anything else with the output other than just print it out? If I don't want automatic type casting to happen, I don't define __toString(), but myToString(), which I call when I need to convert the object to a string.

__toString() is not used for automatic type casting. It is used as a convention *and* to make it nice to print objects. If you need anything more than that then call it explicitly. It would be a nightmare to modify the engine the way you are thinking and many extensions would be fixed.

Probably I didn't catch up with the discussion, but I once mentioned that automatic type casting is quite useful to implement a internationalized string container class. I think it's not only for giving human-readable string representation but it even more makes sense to me in practice. Moriyoshi