Question

Just for the case the autoload thing won’t work, I wonder if it’s fine with PHP to include a class inside a method?

Example:

public method doSomething() {
   include ('MyClass.php');
   $foo = MyClass::doAnotherThing();
}

Answer 1

Yes, you can definitely do that. In fact, that’s exactly what the auto-loading does anyway, since __autoload() is itself a function, and you generally use it to look around for your class file to load.

If you manually include your class files like that however, you’ll definitely want to use require_once() rather than include() or require(), otherwise you’ll get a duplicate declaration of the class.