Question

from my understanding, require pastes code into the calling php file.

what if you were requiring from inside a method…it would paste the entire code/class inside the method, blocking the next statement in the method.

eg.

  function test() {

    require 'pathtosomeclasscode';
    somestatement; // any code after the require is blocked.

 }

how do i get around this, to be able to require code where-ever, without it being pasted in that exact spot?

Answer 1

Somewhat surprisingly, this appears to work just fine. The included code will execute inside the scope of Baz::bork() — but the the code simply defines a class, and classes are global. So you end up with a defined class.

File: Foo.php:

<?PHP
class Foo{
      function bar(){
               echo "Hello from Foo::bar()!\n";
      }
}

File: Baz.php:

<?PHP
class Baz{

      function bork(){
               require_once "Foo.php";
               $f = new Foo();
           $f->bar();
      }
}

echo "testing internal definition:\n";
$b = new Baz();
$b->bork();

echo "\ntesting in global scope:\n";

$f = new Foo();
$f->bar();
echo "\nall done\n";

Output:

$ php Baz.php
testing internal definition:
Hello from Foo::bar()!

testing in global scope:
Hello from Foo::bar()!

all done

Now, I can’t think of many places where you’d want to do things this way. People typically require_once() any possible dependencies at the top of their class file, outside of the class definition.