How do I get an object's unqualified (short) class name?

Question

How do I check the class of an object within the PHP name spaced environment without specifying the full namespaced class.

For example suppose I had an object library/Entity/Contract/Name.

The following code does not work as get_class returns the full namespaced class.

If(get_class($object) == 'Name') {
... do this ...
}

The namespace magic keyword returns the current namespace, which is no use if the tested object has another namespace.

I could simply specify the full classname with namespaces, but this seems to lock in the structure of the code. Also not of much use if I wanted to change the namespace dynamically.

Can anyone think of an efficient way to do this. I guess one option is regex.

Answer 1

You can do this with reflection. Specifically, you can use the ReflectionClass::getShortName method, which gets the name of the class without its namespace.

First, you need to build a ReflectionClass instance, and then call the getShortName method of that instance:

$reflect = new ReflectionClass($object);
if ($reflect->getShortName() === 'Name') {
    // do this
}

However, I can't imagine many circumstances where this would be desirable. If you want to require that the object is a member of a certain class, the way to test it is with instanceof. If you want a more flexible way to signal certain constraints, the way to do that is to write an interface and require that the code implement that interface. Again, the correct way to do this is with instanceof. (You can do it with ReflectionClass, but it would have much worse performance.)