Posted by Colin McKinnon on 09/16/05 14:20

www.douglassdavis.com wrote:

>
> 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.
>

This seems an odd thing to say.

> 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?
>

Its up to you. You could look at how PEAR handles this (which is fairly
*correct* but you then get all the disadvantages of using PEAR). Personaly,
I usually use trigger_error() and my own error handler although this isn't
a very OO way of doing things.

C.

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