Very new to OOP so please bear with me. I have a method that checks characteristics of a persons array and has a counter to keep track of things. The persons array starts off as serialized data, which I'm converting to an array with the unzerialize() function. When I do var_dump($this->people)
in the constructor, I get the correct values. When I do the same in any of the other methods in the class, the array is duplicated a number of times and my counter produces incorrect values.
Also doing echo gettype($this->people)
in the constructor results in array
as expected, but in the other methods results in arrayarrayarrayarray....
What could be causing this duplication? And how do I solve it?
* EDIT *
Sorry for the confusion. I did not know where the problem was so it was difficult for me to explain properly.
The problem is not with my class definition, but how I am using the object. I have reworked the code to illustrate. I thought that once the object was instantiated, the values produced by it would be set, however it turns out that each time I call the get_results()
method, $this->num
is incremented and the value is persisted.
So my question is, how do I run the get_results()
method once, and access the results[]
array without changing the values? I was hoping I could do something like if($nums['results']['num'] == 1)
but that results in a fatal error.
class DoStuff
{
private $num;
public $results;
public function __construct($val)
{
$this->num = $val;
$this->results = [];
}
private function compute_num()
{
$this->num++;
$this->results['num'] = $this->num;
return $this->results;
}
public function get_results()
{
$this->results = $this->compute_num();
return $this->results;
}
}
$nums = new DoStuff(0);
$nums->get_results();
if($nums->get_results()['num'] == 1)
{
printf('<p>(if) Num is: %d</p>', $nums->get_results()['num']);
}
else
{
printf('<p>(else) Num is: %d</p>', $nums->get_results()['num']);
}
// Prints (else) Num is: 3