Posted by www.douglassdavis.com on 09/16/05 11:09

lets say i have a class


class Thing
{
function __construct($string)
{
// initialize by string
}
}


Let's say an invalid string is passed to construct it. What is the
appropriate way to handle this? I know in Java I would probably throw
an exception, but I don't know how much people really use exceptions in
PHP right now. So, I don't want to depend on it.

What would be the appropriate way to handle this type of situation? I
was thinking of two options

1. A ThingFactory that just returns null if the Thing couldn't be
instantiated.

2. Remove the constructor and just have an initThing($string) method
that returns false when something goes wrong.

What would be appropriate here?

--
http://www.douglassdavis.com

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