PHP equivalence: onMissingMethod()

G'day:
Whilst looking at overloading in PHP before ("Looking at PHP's OOP from a CFMLer's perspective: overloading (which is not what you'd assume it is)"), I thought I might need to write an equivalent on onMissingMethod(), to catch instances of me calling... methods which I expected not to exist. I didn't need to because PHP works differently form how I expected it to, but it piqued my interest so I've just looked up how this is done. It's easy.



Here's a CFML example:

// Missing.cfc
component {
    public function onMissingMethod(name, args) {
        writeDump(arguments);
    }
}

// missing.cfm
missing = new Missing();

missing.nonExistent("first",["second"]);

Nothing out of the ordinary there. It outputs:

Scope Arguments
name	1	string nonExistent
args	2	Scope Arguments 1 1 string first 2 2 Array 1 string second

So the first argument is the function that was called (and does not exist), and the second are the arguments passed to it.

Very similarly, here's the PHP equivalent:

<?php
// Missing.class.php

class Missing
{

    public function __call($name, $arguments)
    {
        require "../../../debug/dBug.php";
        new dBug(func_get_args());
    }
}

<?php
// missing.php

require "Missing.class.php";

$missing = new Missing();

$missing->nonExistent("first", ["second"]);

And the output here is:

func_get_args() (array)
0	nonExistent
1	array 0 first 1 array 0 second

So __call() is the PHP equivalent of onMissingMethod(), and works pretty much the same way.

PHP also has the notion of static methods, and there's a handler for missing static methods too. Here's a variation of the above code... the difference is basically we use __callStatic() instead:

<?php
// Missing.class.php

require "../../../debug/dBug.php";

class Missing
{

    public function __call($name, $arguments)
    {
        echo sprintf("Function called: %s", __FUNCTION__);
        new dBug(func_get_args());
    }

    public static function __callStatic($name, $arguments)
    {
        echo sprintf("Function called: %s", __FUNCTION__);
        new dBug(func_get_args());
    }
}

<?php
// missing.php

require "Missing.class.php";

$missing = new Missing();

$missing->nonExistent("first", ["second"]);
echo "<hr>";

Missing::nonExistent("tuatahi", ["tuarua"]);

This outputs:

Function called: __call

func_get_args() (array)
0	nonExistent
1	array 0 first 1 array 0 second

---

Function called: __callStatic

func_get_args() (array)
0	nonExistent
1	array 0 tuatahi 1 array 0 tuarua

So that's straight forward too.

I realise there's not much insight to this article, but I just wanted to share when things go smoothly as well as when I get undone by weirdness / ignorance.

--
Adam