🎭 Basic type-casting functionality for PHP.
MIT License
Basic groundwork for type-casting in PHP.
The recommended and easiest way to install this library is through Composer:
composer require uuf6429/php-castable
cast($value, $type)
function that converts a value to a target type.Castable
interface, exposes method that is called whenever cast()
is called on objects implementing this interface.NotCastableException
.While cast()
is just a regular PHP function, it would be the equivalent to type-casting operators in other languages (e.g. val as Type
, (Type)val
, val.to(Type)
, CAST(val, TYPE)
...).
class Cat implements \uuf6429\Castable\Castable
{
public function castTo($type)
{
if ($type === Dog::class) {
return new Dog();
}
throw new RuntimeException("Unsupported type $type.");
}
}
class Dog {}
$dog = \uuf6429\Castable\cast(new Cat(), Dog::class); // ok, cat becomes a dog :)
$cat = \uuf6429\Castable\cast($dog, Cat::class); // not allowed
The casting process follows these steps:
Castable
interface, castTo()
is called and its value returned.settype()
is attempted.At any point in time, errors or unsupported type-casting could occur, in which case a NotCastableException
is thrown.
In many cases, having specific castToX()
methods in your classes is enough, and it typically works adequately.
However, this could get very repetitive and somewhat error-prone, until a more dynamic solution is needed. This package helps to safely avoid all that boilerplate code.