Question

I was just going through the curl library for codeigniter to understand the code. Here is the link. There is this function __call() which I am not sure about. Is it an inbuilt function in CI? I suppose it is called whenever any method of this library is called, for example using

$this->curl->simple_get();

Can someone please shed the light. I couldn’t find much info on the codeigniter user guide.

Answer 1

No – __call() is a php function. It is known as one of the magic methods.

The magic method __call() is to undeclared methods what __get() and __set() are to undeclared data member.

These methods are automatically called internally when the program tires to execute a method that has not been defined within the class at the time of development.

__call() takes two arguments. The first argument is the name of the undeclared method invoked by the program and the second is an array that contains a list of parameters passed to the undeclared array

• check http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.overloading.php#object.call

Example

class Customer {

    public function __call($name, $args) {
        var_dump($name);
        echo "\n";
        var_dump($args);
        echo "\n";
    }
}

$c = new Customer();
$c->setName("some","name");

Ref