Hello Moriyoshi,
Monday, December 1, 2003, 2:56:29 PM, you wrote:
> On 2003/12/01, at 19:39, Andi Gutmans wrote:
>> At 12:50 AM 12/1/2003 -0500, Adam Maccabee Trachtenberg wrote:
>>> On Sun, 30 Nov 2003, Andi Gutmans wrote:
>>>
>>> > At 11:59 AM 11/28/2003 -0500, Adam Maccabee Trachtenberg wrote:
>>>
>>> > >As far as I'm concerned, if you don't want your object to be
>>> > >auomatically cast to a string, you shouldn't provide a __toString()
>>> > >method.
>>> >
>>> > Wrong. __toString() isn't supposed to work in every case the engine
>>> expects
>>> > a string.
>>> > You'd probably also want $obj[3] to work as a string offset?
>>> > In this case, maybe we should rename __toString to __toPrintable,
>>> because I
>>> > think Marcus' patch is asking for trouble.
>>>
>>> Maybe I'm the one who is confused. What's the point of having a magic
>>> __toString() method (or __toPrintable()) if it doesn't let the object
>>> pretend it's a string?
>>>
>>> You're saying it's okay to do:
>>>
>>> class foo {
>>> public function __toString() {
>>> return "foo";
>>> }
>>> }
>>>
>>> $obj = new foo;
>>> print $foo;
>>>
>>> But not:
>>>
>>> print htmlentities($foo);
>>>
>>> That makes absolutely no sense to me. What if __toString() returns
>>> characters that need encoding? Or if I want to do anything else with
>>> the output other than just print it out?
>>>
>>> If I don't want automatic type casting to happen, I don't define
>>> __toString(), but myToString(), which I call when I need to convert
>>> the
>>> object to a string.
>>
>> __toString() is not used for automatic type casting. It is used as a
>> convention *and* to make it nice to print objects. If you need
>> anything more than that then call it explicitly. It would be a
>> nightmare to modify the engine the way you are thinking and many
>> extensions would be fixed.
> Probably I didn't catch up with the discussion, but I once mentioned
> that automatic type casting is quite useful to implement a
> internationalized
> string container class. I think it's not only for giving
> human-readable string representation but it even more makes
> sense to me in practice.
Well we had all we wanted to make ext/simplexml and such a thing working but
now it is all for nothing....shitty code!
--
Best regards,
Marcus mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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