What is the point of "var"?

[Anon]

What does this keyword do? If I delete the "var" declarations, it doesn't seem to make any difference to my code. Having the var declaration doesn't even prevent "undefined property" error messages unless you do:

var $variable = "a value";

So what's the point, apart from greater clarity? Don't get me wrong, I'd really like var to do something. In fact, I wish PHP required you to declare all variables (or at least have the option, as in Visual Basic).

But it doesn't seem to do anything.

[Anon]

Well in a class, you can establish a class wide variable by using var

so you could use it in any of the methods of the class without having to pass it to the method declaring as global inside of the method.

[Anon]

Louie wrote:

Well in a class, you can establish a class wide variable by using var

so you could use it in any of the methods of the class without having to pass it to the method declaring as global inside of the method.

You don't need var for that. Look at this code snippet:

class testclass {
var $value;
function set($value) {
$this->value = $value;
}
function get() {
return $this->value;
}
}
$tc = new testclass;
$tc->set("foo");
echo $tc->get();

It works just as well if you delete the "var" line. You still echo "foo".

[Anon]

I think your missing the point: Let's say within your class you want to use the value of $this->value in multiple methods within the class itself not calls to the class' methods

class test {
var $sessid;

function test() {
global $sessid;
$this->sessid = $sessid;
}

function one () {
print $this->sessid;
}

function two () {
global $db;
$db->query("INSERT into sessions VALUES ('$this->sessid')");
}

You see you can use $this->sessid in any method within the class without passing it to the method or using global

}

[Anon]

Louie wrote:

I think your missing the point:

No, I'm not. That code will work perfectly well without the var line. Try it.

[Anon]

Well damn, you are right, but my feeling is that if you don't want to run an extra function to setup class level variables you could do it as properties of the class with var

like:

class DB {
var $dbhost = "localhost";
var $dbuser = "user";
var $dbpass = "pass";

}

Now you could use those vars in your internal methods of the class without having to run a function to declare them.