Call static function from variable

Question

I have the following setup:

class test {
     public static function something() {
          $somethingElseFunction = "somethingElse";

          // How can I call the method with the name saved in variable?
     }

     public static function somethingElse($a) {
          echo 'bla';
     }
}

How can I call the function using the variable? (the function name is in variable). Also I need to do a function_exists() for it.

Tried this:

    if (function_exists(self::$somethingElseFunction ())) {
                if (!call_user_func(self::$somethingElseFunction , $a)) {

                }
            }

Didn't work.

Answer 1

In PHP>=5.4 you can use just self:: de-reference:

self::$somethingElseFunction();

-but in earlier versions that will cause error (because it wasn't allowed to use dynamic static methods de-reference). So then you can always use such things as call_user_func_array() :

class test {
     public static function something() {
          $somethingElseFunction = "somethingElse";

         call_user_func_array(array(__CLASS__, $somethingElseFunction), array("bla"));
     }

     public static function somethingElse($a) {
          var_dump($a);
     }
}

test::something();

-this will work for PHP>=5.0

About function_exists() call - it expects string as parameter, thus I recommend to use method_exists() - because that function is intended to do the stuff:

 public static function something() {
     $somethingElseFunction = "somethingElse";
     if(method_exists(__CLASS__, $somethingElseFunction))
     {
        call_user_func_array(array(__CLASS__, $somethingElseFunction), array("bla"));
     }
 }