Question

I’m not sure if I’m losing it or what. I recently jumped back into PHP after a much needed break, and I’m trying to do something that I’ve always been able to do: call a public class method without instantiating the class. Example:

  class Utils 
  {
    public function getTime() 
    {
      return time();
    }
  }

  $time = Utils::getTime();
  echo $time;

I used to do this all the time (about two or three years ago), but after hopping into PHP 5.3 on a new sandbox environment that I set up, I keep getting

  Fatal error: Call to undefined function getTime() in /mnt/richard/index.php on line 24

Am I missing something silly here? Or is the use of public class methods without class instantiation a now deprecated feature in PHP? Oh how times have changed…

My overall goal is to be able to create methods that belong to a grouped set of classes that can be called in the global scope within other methods and classes. Any help will be much appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

You shouldn’t be calling instance methods as static ones on a class, even if PHP allows you to do so. When invoking:

 Utils::getTime();

you are calling an instance method from a static context. You should define getTime like this instead:

class Utils 
{
    public static function getTime() 
    {
       // You can't use $this in here. This is a static function. No instance exists.
       return time();
    }
}