Re: Why change require_once? A brief explanation of motives

Johannes Schlüter wrote:

Hi, On Tue, 2007-07-17 at 12:22 +0200, Lukas Kahwe Smith wrote:

Failure to __autoload() a class always results in a fatal error, exceptions thrown in __autoload() cannot be caught. You didn't provide sample code Philippe asked you about [1] and I suppose that's because you simply can't.

====== Bar.php ======= class Bar { public static function factory($driver) {

     $class_name = 'Bar_'.$driver;
     if (__autoload($class_name)) {
       return new $class_name();
     }
     throw new Exception('unable to load');

} }

Imo it would be better to trigger __autoload() using class_exists() like in class Bar { public static function factory($driver) {

     $class_name = 'Bar_'.$driver;
     if (class_exists($class_name, true)) {
       return new $class_name();
     }
     throw new Exception('unable to load');

} } (the 2nd parameter to class_exists defaults to true, but I think it's cleaner to have it there...) Another work-around for throwing Exceptions is by using eval to create a class - but well, this is only useful if you are sure the class would never ever exist afterwards:

I specifically did not want to do this, in order to allow error handling without such a hack. regards, Lukas