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

$this is used to make a reference to the current instance of an object. So you can do things like:

class MyClass {
    private $name;

    public function setName($name) {
        $this->name = $name;
    }

    //vs
    public function setName($pName) {
        $name = $pName;
    }
}

Also another cool use is that you can chain methods:

class MyClass2 {
    private $firstName;
    private $lastName;

    public function setFirstName($name) {
        $this->firstName = $name;
        return $this;
    }

    public function setLastName($name) {
        $this->lastName = $name;
        return $this;
    }

    public function sayHello() {
        print "Hello {$this->firstName} {$this->lastName}";
    }
}

//And now you can do:
$newInstance = new MyClass2;
$newInstance->setFirstName("John")->setLastName("Doe")->sayHello();