Question

I have this method :

public function getInstance()
{
    $classname = $this->getFullyQualifiedClassName();
    return new $classname();
}

Is there a way to write this without the $classname variable, which gets used only once?

Answer 1

You could use Reflection:

$reflectionClass = new ReflectionClass('SomeClassName'); 
$reflectionClass->newInstanceArgs(array(1, 2, 3));

But as far as I know, that will be a lot slower than the solution you already have. In a perfect world you could just write something like this:

return new ( $this->getFullyQualifiedClassName() )(); // THIS DOES NOT WORK!!!

But unfortunately PHP’s syntax isn’t very flexible, and therefore you have to create that ugly variable thats troubling you.

---

I just realized that there is another (very ugly) way to do it: eval:

return eval("return new ".$this->getFullyQualifiedClassName()."();");

I do not suggest that you used this though, because of the security risk that comes with using eval.