Can you use static constants in PHP?

Question

I expected the following to work but it doesn\'t seem to.

Answer 1

In PHP, static and const are two different things.

const denotes a class constant. They're different than normal variables as they don't have the '$' in front of them, and can't have any visibility modifiers (public, protected, private) before them. Their syntax:

class Test
{
    const INT = "/^\d+$/";
}

Because they're constant, they're immutable.

Static denotes data that is shared between objects of the same class. This data can be modified. An example would be a class that keeps track of how many instances are in play at any one time:

class HowMany
{
    private static $count = 0;

    public function __construct()
    {
        self::$count++;
    }

    public function getCount()
    {
        return self::$count;
    }

    public function __destruct()
    {
        self::$count--;
    }
}

$obj1 = new HowMany();
$obj2 = new HowMany();

echo $obj1->getCount();

unset($obj2);

echo $obj1->getCount();