Get a PHP object's ancestors in the inheritance tree

Question

I have an object and want to list all parent classes up until stdClass or whatever.

I have added a polymorphic field to my database table (say categories) and want to automate my finder method so that super classes are also returned, this way i can jump into the inheritance tree at a point i know not necessarily the final subclass:

FoodCategory::find_by_id(10) === Category::find_by_id(10)

SELECT * FROM categories WHERE ..... AND type IN ('FoodCategory', 'Category');

Roughly i guess:

function get_class_lineage($object){
    $class = get_parent_class($object);
    $lineage = array();
    while($class != 'stdClass'){
        $dummy_object = new $class();
        $lineage[] = $class = get_parent_class($dummy_object);
    }

    return $lineage;
}

But this instantiates an object, does anyone know how to achieve this without?

Thanks for any input, i feel like i'm missing something obvious here.

Answer 1

After being pointed to the duplicate question i have gone for:

function get_class_lineage($object){
    $class_name = get_class($object);
    $parents = array_values(class_parents($class_name));
    return array_merge(array($class_name), $parents);
}

The class_parents function from the standard library was the obvious thing i was overlooking.

I thought Reflection was overkill for this simple task.