Question

I’ve got a CI Library which loads translatable content from an XML file into a class, and the class has a magic __get method which checks if that property is defined when it is referenced, returning the localised key if so, or the keyname plus ‘_#’ to let me know that translation is missing if not.

All cool.

However, because this all depends on properties on an object, I get lots of ‘notice: undefined etc..’ warnings when I’m running in debug (E_ALL), and it’s annoying. I don’t want to disable notices, but i do want to know how to disable this inside this particular library (if possible). I could put @ in front of every call to the class, but again, that’s pretty horrible too.

Any tips?

Simplified code snippets below:

class MY_Translation
{

    function _get_keys($lang) {
        // load xml translations, could split this into different files..

        $translations = new DOMDocument();
        $translations->load($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/xml/translations.xml");
        if ($translations) {
            $words = $translations->getElementsByTagName("word");
            $count = 0;
            foreach( $words as $word ){

                $name = $word->getAttribute('name');
                $trans = $word->childNodes;

                if ($trans->length > 0) {
                    for($i = 0; $i < $trans->length; $i++) {
                        $child = $trans->item($i); 

                        if ($child->nodeName == $lang) {
                            $this->$name = $child->nodeValue;
                        }
                    }
                }
            }   
        }
    }

    function __get($key){
        if (property_exists('MY_Translation',$this->$key)) {
            return $this->$key;
        } else {
            return $key."_#";
        }
    }

}

XML (just for reference, so it’s clear what’s happening):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<words>
    <word name="thing">
        <en>thing en</en>
        <pt>thing pt</pt>
    </word>
</words>

Answer 1

As you use $this to store the translations, __get is only called on non-existent properties. Change it, the warning you get only notifies you that you’re doing something wrong:

function __get($key)
{
    return $key."_#";
}

That’s really all you need to do.

---

Did you mean

$this->t->$key

instead of

$this->$key

?

Then you would need to fix the assignment as well:

$this->t->$name = ...

In general, as you check for the property in the __get function you should not see any warning. The warnings show you that you’ve made some error in your program logic, so they are useful and you should not disable them not even for a short part of your code. Disabling warnings is not the solution but fixing the code.

Let me know if this was helpful.