What does “return $this” mean?

Question

I\'m trying to understand this code, and when I arrived at the final line, I didn\'t get it. :(

Can I have your help in order to find out, what does re

Answer 1

Its a common OOP technique called Fluent Interface. It main purpose to help chain multiple method calls in languages, that do not support method cascading, like PHP. So

return $this;

will return an updated instance(object) of that class so it can make another call in its scope. See example in PHP,

class Class_Name {
    private field1;
    private field2;
    private field3;

    public function setField1($value){

        $this->field1 = $value;

        return $this; 
    }

    public function setField2($value){

        $this->field2 = $value;

        return $this; 
    }

    public function setField3($value){

        $this->field3 = $value;

        return $this; 
    }
} 

$object = new Class_Name();
$object->setField1($value1)->setField2($value2)->setField3($value3);