Re: __toString()

On Dec 15, 2003, at 1:09 AM, Andi Gutmans wrote:

At 08:35 PM 12/14/2003 -0500, Jon Parise wrote:

On Sun, Dec 14, 2003 at 03:41:10PM +0100, Sebastian Bergmann wrote: It is supported by "print" and for internal extensions such as SimpleXML which require this.

How is it supported by "print" when

    print $defect->thrownException()

does not work but the object returned from thrownException() has a __toString() method?

Hopefully, this still works (don't have a recent PHP5 build to try):

    print (string)$defect->thrownException();

The explicit cast also addresses this case:

    print (string)$defect->thrownException() . "\n";

Nope. How is it different or nicer than doing $defect->thrownException()->__toString()? It saves you 4 characters?

If it doesn't do anything 'magical', why bother with the __? If you always have to call it manually, it should be an interface: interface Stringable {

        public function toString();

} And that way extensions and user code both can decide if they want to give special treatment to objects that implement Stringable. George