If you’ve been working with PHP 5 for a while, then you’ll probably know what “Type Hinting” is about. If you don’t, let me point you in the right direction. In short, the “Type Hinting” feature will allow you to force parameters of functions (or methods) to be objects of a specific type. As you’ll see, this is very useful for filtering input objects that are passed to a class method, without having to worry whether these objects belong to the correct type or not. If the condition isn’t met, a fatal error is triggered.

The basic syntax of “Type Hinting” can be seen in the following example:

// class 'MessageLister'
class MessageLister {
    public function __construct(Message $message) {
        echo $message->getMessage();
    }
}
// class 'Message'
class Message {
    public $message;
    public function __construct($message) {
        $this->message=$message;
    }
    public function getMessage(){
        return $this->message;
    }
}

As you can see, in the above example I defined two simple classes. The first one, “MessageLister,” takes care of displaying basic string messages, while the second one, “Message,” stores the message passed as parameter as a class property. Now, if you turn your attention to the first class, you’ll notice it forces its $message incoming argument to be an object of type “Message.” If this condition isn’t satisfied, then the script will trigger a fatal error. To clarify this concept, study the example listed below:

$message=new Message('This is a test string');
$msglister=new MessageLister($message); // displays "This is a
test string';
$message='This is a test string';
$msglister=new MessageLister($message); // throws a fatal error.
$message is not of type 'Message'

In the first case, the above snippet will display the test string as one would normally expect, while in the second example, a fatal error is triggered, since the test string isn’t an object of type “Message.” That was simple, wasn’t it?

Right, I hope this basic example helped you to understand the functionality of “Type Hinting” in PHP 5. Now that you know how this feature works, let’s use it for improving the web page generator class that I showed you in my previous tutorial, so you can have gain an accurate idea of how “Type Hinting” can work for you in applications that use object type enforcing. Let’s move on together to learn how this is done.