When would you use the $this keyword in PHP?

Question

When would you use the $this keyword in PHP? From what I understand $this refers to the object created without knowing the objects name.

Al

Answer 1

The most common use case is within Object Oriented Programming, while defining or working within a class. For example:

class Horse {
    var $running = false;

    function run() {
        $this->running = true;
    }
}

As you can see, within the run function, we can use the $this variable to refer to the instance of the Horse class that we are "in". So the other thing to keep in mind is that if you create 2 Horse classes, the $this variable inside of each one will refer to that specific instance of the Horse class, not to them both.