This might look as a stupid question. But, I have a class with some public string variables defined in it.
Upon assigning a value to a property:
$a = new user();
$a->FirstName = "sth";
I want to store the value as UTF8.
I know I can do this via:
$a->Firstname = utf8_encode("sth");
However, I want the object to do this automatically.
How can I do this?
Otherwise no, the object cannot do it automatically.
Not automatically, but automagically!
<?php
class User {
/**
* Change the public to private/protected!
*/
private $Firstname;
/**
* This is automatically called upon calling a value that can't be written "from the outside".
*/
public function __set( $key, $value ) {
$this->$key = utf8_encode( $value );
}
public function __get( $key ) {
return isset( $this->$key ) ? $this->$key : false;
}
}
$user = new User;
$user->Firstname = 'Berry';
echo $user->Firstname;
The better solution would be to refactor in using mutators and accessors, or better yet, learn OO.
$a->FirstName = "sth"; ??
You want to use setters and getters. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encapsulation_%28object-oriented_programming%29
Like:
class User
{
protected $Firstname;
public function setFirstname($Firstname) {
$this->Firstname = utf8_encode($Firstname);
}
public function getFirstname() {
return $this->Firstname;
}
}
Example using magic methods:
class User
{
protected $data = array(
'Firstname' => '',
// ...
);
public function __set($key, $value) {
if (isset($this->data[$key])) {
$this->data[$key] = utf8_encode($value);
}
}
public function __get($key) {
return isset($this->data[$key]) ? $this->data[$key] : null;
}
}
Edit: I'm using $data so that there is at least a minimum of control of what properties can be set.
__set is fine too. Probably preferable actually (though I'm not familiar with it). The point here is to use accessors and mutators, however you go about doing that.
If you'd designed your class to have accessors and mutators, rather than public access to raw variables, then this would be easy.
Original code:
class user {
private $FirstName = '';
public function getFirstName() {
return $this->FirstName;
}
}
Solution code:
class user {
private $FirstName = '';
public function getFirstName() {
return utf8_encode($this->FirstName);
}
}
I suggest moving towards this approach.
Otherwise no, the object cannot do it automatically.
Edit
__set and __get might be the most appropriate way to implement this. I'm not too familiar with them, and it doesn't really matter: the point I'm making here is to use accessors and mutators... however you end up implementing them.
utf8_encodedoes? It very specifically converts ISO-8859-1 strings to UTF-8. How can you guarantee that all strings you want to store in this object will be ISO-8859-1 encoded?