Tag: duck operators

Following up on this post regarding a “duck operator” in PHP, I went ahead and wrote a very, very, very simple implementation using reflection api in php to get the same functionality.

getMethods() as $method)
        {
            $ret[$method->getName()] = true;
        }
        
        return $ret;
    }
    
    function it_quacks($object, $interface)
    {
        $reflectionClass = new ReflectionClass($interface);
        $reflectionObject = new ReflectionObject($object);
        
        $reflectionClassMethods = getMethodProperties($reflectionClass);
        $reflectionObjectMethods = getMethodProperties($reflectionObject);
        
        foreach($reflectionClassMethods as $methodName => $methodData)
        {
            if (empty($reflectionObjectMethods[$methodName]))
            {
                return false;
            }
        }
        
        return true;
    }

    if (it_quacks(new MooingGrassEater(), 'Cow'))
    {
        print("A MooingGrassEater can be seen as a Cow\n");
    }
    else
    {
        print("A MooingGrassEater has no hope of being recognized as a Cow\n");
    }

    if (it_quacks(new MooingGrassEater(), 'Sheep'))
    {
        print("A MooingGrassEater can be seen as a Sheep\n");
    }
    else
    {
        print("A MooingGrassEater has no hope of being recognized as a Sheep\n");
    }
?>

Missing obvious points are of course to compare the number of arguments to the methods and wether they’re optional, so that you further ensure call safety. But hey, it’s just an example implementation. Read the original linked page for more information about the concept.