CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpmethodsoverloading
Chuck Le Butt
Chuck Le Butt

Reputation: 48758

Method Overloading in PHP

Excuse my newbishness. While working on an ASP.Net based website, I remember seeing some methods in which could accept a different number of arguments. Specifically, they would do different things, depending on the number of parameters passed to them.

For example:

Email.sendEmail(address,subject,body);

would do something different to:

Email.sendEmail(address,bccaddresses,subject,body);

Is it possible for methods in PHP to do something similar? What is this thing called? Or have I just totally misremembered something?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 199

Answers (4)

Tim
Tim

Reputation: 14446

You could use an associative array as the argument, and make use of extract().

function sendMail($opts){
    extract($opts, EXTR_SKIP); // EXTR_SKIP prevents extract from overwriting anything already in the symbol table
    if(isset($bccaddresses)){
        // do something with the bcc addresses
    }
    echo "sending some mail to $to with subject $subject";
}

sendMail(array("to"=>"[email protected]", "subject"=>"Hi!"));

This lets you pass in the arguments as named values, with optional values as you see fit.

Upvotes: 2

Karoly Horvath
Karoly Horvath

Reputation: 96258

function sendEmail($address, $bccaddresses, $subject, $body=NULL) {
  if ($body === NULL) {
     $bccaddresses=""; //or whatever default you want
     //shift arguments:
     $subject = $bccaddresses; $body = $subject;
  }
}

Upvotes: 3

Tim
Tim

Reputation: 14446

In PHP, you set default values for functions.

function myFunc($val1 = 1, $val2 = 2, $val3 = 3){
    echo "$val1 $val2 $val3";
}


myFunc();     // outputs 1 2 3
myFunc(5);    // outputs 5 2 3
myFunc(8, 1); // outputs 8 1 3

Upvotes: 1

lorenzo-s
lorenzo-s

Reputation: 17010

You are searching for func_num_args() and func_get_args().

See also related examples, it shows you how to do exactly what you need.

Upvotes: 1

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