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
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