[PHPTAL] Usage of __toString magic method

[Kornel Lesiński]

On Sun, 05 Jun 2011 15:58:06 +0100, Manu Robledo <molists at mopot.de> wrote:

> I came a cross some problems, which were caused by PHPTAS relying on the  
> __toString() magic method, when converting objects to strings.
>
> First problem: Exceptions can´t be thrown within __toString(), see:
> <http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2429642/why-its-impossible-to-throw-exception-from-tostring>

That's the contract of __toString, so you shouldn't even try to throw  
exceptions from this method, even if you can get away with it sometimes.

Is there a strong use-case for throwing exceptions at point of conversion  
to string?

> Second problem: __toString() is not correctly implemented in PHP <  
> 5.2.0, so that on a test server with an older PHP version, the output is  
> just "Object".

5.2.0 has been released in 2006! I'd rather not support software even  
older than that.

> Here is, how I extended the phptal_tostring() and phptal_escape()  
> functions to implement this workaround (3 small changes):
>
> http://pastie.org/2022716

Thanks. You bring very good point about implicit cast in implode(). I'll  
fix that one.

-- 
regards, Kornel Lesiński