Question

I want to have a string variable for a PHP class, which would be available to all methods.

However, this variable is quite long, so I want to separate it into multiple lines.

For example,

$variable = "line 1" .
            "line 2" .
            "line 3";

But above doesn’t work.

I tried EOD, but EOD is not allowed within class. And when I declare it outside the class, I can’t access the variable from within the class.

What is the best way?

Answer 1

If you are using PHP >= 5.3, you could use HEREDOC syntax to declare your string :

class MyClass {
    public $str = <<<STR
this is
a long
string
STR;

}

$a = new MyClass();
var_dump($a->str);

But this :

• is only possible with PHP >= 5.3
• and the string must not contain any variable
  • this is because the string’s value must be known at compile-time
  • which, btw, explains why the concatenation, with the ., will not work : it’s done at execution time.

And another drawback is that this will put newlines in the string — which might, or not, be a bad thing.

If you are using PHP <= 5.2 :

You can’t do that ; a solution could be to initialize the string in your class’ constructor :

class MyClass {
    public $str;
    public function __construct() {
        $this->str = <<<STR
this is
a long
string
STR;
    }
}

(same not with newlines)

Or, here, you can do strings concatenations :

class MyClass {
    public $str;
    public function __construct() {
        $this->str = 'this is' .
                     'a long' .
                     'string';
    }
}

(this way, no newlines)

Else, you can have a string that’s surrounded by either single or double quotes, and put it on several lines :

class MyClass {
    public $str = "this is
a long
string";
}

(Here, again, you’ll have newlines in the resulting string)