Finding the PHP File (at run time) where a Class was Defined

php reflection class
Alan Storm picture Alan Storm · Mar 10, 2010 · Viewed 55.7k times · Source

Is there any reflection/introspection/magic in PHP that will let you find the PHP file where a particular class (or function) was defined?

In other words, I have the name of a PHP class, or an instantiated object. I want to pass this to something (function, Reflection class, etc.) that would return the file system path where the class was defined.

/path/to/class/definition.php

I realize I could use (get_included_files()) to get a list of all the files that have been included so far and then parse them all manually, but that's a lot of file system access for a single attempt.

I also realize I could write some additional code in our __autoload mechanism that caches this information somewhere. However, modifying the existing __autoload is off limits in the situation I have in mind.

Hearing about extensions that can do this would be interesting, but I'd ultimately like something that can run on a "stock" install.

Answer

Gordon picture Gordon · Mar 10, 2010

Try ReflectionClass

Example:

class Foo {}
$reflector = new \ReflectionClass('Foo');
echo $reflector->getFileName();

This will return false when the filename cannot be found, e.g. on native classes.

Related questions

Is there any way to set a private/protected static property using reflection classes?

I am trying to perform a backup/restore function for static properties of classes. I can get a list of all of the static properties and their values using the reflection objects getStaticProperties() method. This gets both private and public …

Read More
Instantiate an object without calling its constructor in PHP

To restore the state of an object which has been persisted, I'd like to create an empty instance of the class, without calling its constructor, to later set the properties with Reflection. The only way I found, which is the …

Read More
PHP get static methods

i want to call a class method by a var (like this): $var = "read"; $params = array(...); //some parameter if(/* MyClass has the static method $var */) { echo MyClass::$var($params); } elseif (/* MyClass hat a non-static method $var */) { $cl = new MyClass($params); …

Read More