According to http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.autoload.php the magic function __autoload()
was deprecated as of PHP 7.2.0 and removed as of PHP 8.0.0.
The official alternative is spl_autoload()
. See http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.spl-autoload.php. But the PHP manual does not explain the proper use of this baby.
My question: How to replace this (my automatic class autoloader) with a version with spl_autoload()
?
function __autoload($class) {
include 'classes/' . $class . '.class.php';
}
Problem: I cannot figure out how to give that function a path (it only accepts namespaces).
By the way, there are a lot of threads regarding this topic here on SO, but none gives a clean & simple solution that replaces my sexy one-liner.
You need to register autoload functions with
spl_autoload_register
. You need to provide a "callable". The nicest way of doing this, from 5.3 onwards, is with an anonymous function:The principal advantage of this against
__autoload
is of course that you can callspl_autoload_register
multiple times, whereas__autoload
(like any function) can only be defined once. If you have modular code, this would be a significant drawback.2018 update to this: there shouldn't really be that many occasions when you need to roll your own autoloader. There is a widely accepted standard (called PSR-4) and several conforming implementations. The obvious way of doing this is using Composer.