Re: SimpleXML & Casting to String

At 12:36 29/02/2004 -0500, Sterling Hughes wrote:

The problem is that user-land overloading can't be supported. C extensions might be able to be supported but I don't think it's a good idea to start hacking this into PHP. It wouldn't end at the comparison operator but people would want it to work everywhere.

I don't want user overloading - I've been consistently against that for objects of all types. I want it internally cause its important to be able to overload all operations for something like SimpleXML to properly work. The same applies to ext/mono (has the same issues as java, but even more due to field and property distinctions.)

My concern lies more with functions like utf8_encode() not properly getting the contents of the XML string - but I haven't looked into it too much - I'll try and get some hacking done on the cruise.

The way to do it today is to do a cast to (string) although I admit it's not a beautiful solution.

Right - what I don't understand is that why doesn't convert_to_string_ex() handle this?

Because it's much more complicated than just changing convert_to_string_ex(). You have to modify all comparison operators to support this and god knows what else. Andi