Question

Helo everyone.

I have a class MyClass and a function escape() that can be called as a static class or as an instantiated Object.

MyClass::_escape('..... some string...');

or

$myclass->escape();

What I would like is not to have the underscore on the staic version and for both just have the same function definition. I trie to do.

    class MyClass {

    public $_string = "";

      public function escape($string = null) {

            if($string == null) 
                  return new String(mysql_real_escape_string($this->_string));
            else
                  return new String(mysql_real_escape_string($string)); 

      }


   }

but this function fails by the PHP parser. Is there a way of doing what I attempted to above??

So to summarise, I would like the static call to look like;

   print Myclass::escape('some string');

and the instantiated call to look like;

   print $myobject->escape(); //Which escapes the private variable _string

Hope this was clear.

regards

Answer 1

There are no parse errors in the code you posted. In fact, it works just as you want it to work, as long as you never pass $string to the escape() method in an object context:

$foo = new MyClass();
$foo->_string = 'foo';
$foo->escape(); // This works.
MyClass::escape('bar'); // This works, too.
$foo->escape('baz'); // Don't do this.  It'll escape $string instead of $this->_string.

You could resolve this issue by determining whether or not you’re in a static context within the escape() method, instead of checking for the existence of $string.