Question

I am wondering whats the best practices regarding functions and objects. For example I want to perform an action called tidy. It will take my data as input and tidy it and return it.

Now I can do this in two ways. One using a simple function and the other using a class.

Function: $data = tidy($data); Class: $tidy = new Tidy(); $data = $tidy->clean($tidy); 

Now the advantage in making it a class is that I do not have to load the class before. I can simply use the autoload feature of php to do so.

Another example is the database class. Now everyone seems to be using a separate class for db connectivity. But we usually have a single object of that class only. Isn’t this kind of contrary to the definition of class and objects in a sense that we are using the class only to intantiate a single object?

I kind of dont understand when to use a function and when to use a class. What is the best practice regarding the same? Any guidelines?

Thank you, Alec

Answer 1

I’d personally make a ‘data’ object that handles data then have a tidy method under it.

This pattern will allow the number of tasks you do on data to expand while containing it all in a nice little self-contained chunk.