Question

I would like to be able to call a closure that I assign to an object’s property directly without reassigning the closure to a variable and then calling it. Is this possible?

The code below doesn’t work and causes Fatal error: Call to undefined method stdClass::callback().

$obj = new stdClass();
$obj->callback = function() {
    print "HelloWorld!";
};
$obj->callback();

Answer 1

As of PHP7, you can do

$obj = new StdClass;
$obj->fn = function($arg) { return "Hello $arg"; };
echo ($obj->fn)('World');

or use Closure::call(), though that doesn’t work on a StdClass.

---

Before PHP7, you’d have to implement the magic __call method to intercept the call and invoke the callback (which is not possible for StdClass of course, because you cannot add the __call method)

class Foo
{
    public function __call($method, $args)
    {
        if(is_callable(array($this, $method))) {
            return call_user_func_array($this->$method, $args);
        }
        // else throw exception
    }
}

$foo = new Foo;
$foo->cb = function($who) { return "Hello $who"; };
echo $foo->cb('World');

Note that you cannot do

return call_user_func_array(array($this, $method), $args);

in the __call body, because this would trigger __call in an infinite loop.