Question

From other posts, it appears that if you have namespaces defined and want to dynamically create an object in another namespace, you have to construct a string and use that in the new call. However, I’m getting a weird behavior. It appears that this method does not work going across namespaces.

User.php:

namespace application\models;

class User {

        public function hello() {
                echo "Hello from User!";
        }
}

Controller.php:

namespace application\controllers;

use application\models;

require('User.php');

$userStr = 'models\\User';
//$userOne = new $userStr();  //Doesn't work. Gets a "Class 'models\User' not found" error
$userOne = new models\User();  //Works fine

$userStr = '\\application\\models\\User';
$userTwo = new $userStr();  //Works fine

$userOne->hello();
$userTwo->hello();

Any idea why when using a variable for the class name, I need to use the fully qualified namespace when it’s in a variable, but hard coded, I can leverage the “use” command?

Answer 1

You can not import with use into variable classnames. That is a limitation of PHP.

See as well the related questions:

• Expanding PHP namespace alias to full namespace string
• Can’t get constant from dynamic class using namespaces