The get_class() alternative in PHP 8
If you’re working with PHP for a while, there might be a good chance that you’d be in need to fetch the class of an object. This could be mostly for debugging purposes.
So, pre-PHP 8, you could do it by using PHP’s get_class() method. Take the following for example.
<?php
namespace Foo\Bar;
class Baz
{
public function __construct()
{
}
}
$baz = new \Foo\Bar\Baz;
var_dump(get_class($baz));
// string(11) "Foo\Bar\Baz"
As you can tell, using get_class on a class object gives us the fully qualified class name (FQCN) for the particular object.
Using ::class on objects in PHP 8
Things have now been simplified in PHP 8. You can now directly use the ::class on the class object to get the FQCN of that object. For instance, in the previous example, you can use ::class instead of get_class() like so.
$baz = new \Foo\Bar\Baz;
var_dump($baz::class);
// string(11) "Foo\Bar\Baz"
This was not possible in previous versions of PHP. The ::class keyword was only be applicable on classes to get the name of the class in form of a string.
Also note that using ::class on a string or null would throw a TypeError exception like so.
$object = null;
var_dump($object::class); // TypeError
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