Question

1st Question:

In PHP there is:

$b = new SomeClass();
$a = "foo";
$b->$a("something"); // This is the same as $b->foo("something");

How do you do this in C#?

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2nd Question:

In PHP I can iterate through each method on a class, similar to:

$a = new SomeClass(); // Which implements methodA, methodB;
foreach($method in get_class_methods(SomeClass()))
{
  $method("do stuff with each method");
}

How to do this in C#?

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3rd Question

PHP has a magic method __call() if a Class does not implement a method it executes it as a default such as if a method doesn’t exist it still can run

class NewClass()
{
// constructor

__call(class name, array of parameters)
{

}
}

so if you do

$a = new NewClass();
$a->thisDoesntExistButWorks("123","abc");

// The method gets "magically created"  such as
thisDoesntExistButWorks(array with 123 and abc)....

Answer 1

1 and 2 have been answered more than once. So i’ll attempt 3.

C# does not provide an unknown method method because it doesn’t have to. If you call the Method directly like a.NonExistentMethod() then the program simply wont compile, and the idea of catching the bad call at runtime is irrelevant.

As you have already found out though it it possible to call methods dynamically at runtime by doing a.GetType().GetMethod("NonExistentMethod").Invoke(a, new object[0]). This will fail with a NullReferenceException because the call to GetMethod returns null. However this situation is detectable, and so maybe we can do something about it. Here is an extension method that behaves as much like PHP as possible. Please note that this is untested, and should never be used in production (or probably even experimental) code.

This can by used by doing this a.CallOrDefault("method name", arg1, arg2);

public static class PhpStyleDynamicMethod
{
    public static void __call(Type @class, object[] parameters)
    {
        // Do stuff here.
    }

    public static object CallOrDefault(this object b, string method, params object[] parameters)
    {
        var methods = b.GetType().GetMethods().Where(m => m.Name == method && DoParametersMatch(m.GetParameters(), parameters));

        var count = methods.Count();

        if (count == 1)
            return methods.Single().Invoke(b, parameters);

        if (count > 1)
            throw new ApplicationException("could not resolve a single method.");

        __call(b.GetType(), parameters);

        return null;
    }

    public static bool DoParametersMatch(ParameterInfo[] parameters, object[] values)
    {
        if (parameters == null && values == null) return true;
        if (parameters == null) return false;
        if (values == null) return false;
        if (parameters.Length != values.Length) return false;

        for(int i = 0; i < parameters.Length; i++)
        {
            var parameter = parameters[i];
            var value = values[i];

            if (!parameter.GetType().IsAssignableFrom(value.GetType()))
                return false;
        }

        return true;
    }
}