Question

Why can I not do something like the following when I know that the property of myobject is going to be declared already:

define('title','boats');

myobject->title;

but this works:

myobject->boats

Is this even good practice?

Answer 1

You can’t use

$myobject->title

as this is attempting to access the title property of your object. If this property does not exist, an error will be triggered.

You can use

$myobject->{title}

but I’d rather see you use a variable instead of a constant, eg

$title = 'boats';
echo $myobject->$title;

Ideally, you will know which property you want to access and use its name appropriately

$myobject->boats