just starting to write PHP classes -- error message

[sfullman]

so I'm just starting to work with pHP classes. I'd categorize myself as advanced in PHP other than classes, but I encountered my first error:

class Stats{
    ... code

$user['sam']='Samuel Fullman';  // say this is line 4
$user['joe']='Joe Smith';

}

The response is,
Parse error: parse error, unexpected '[', expecting ',' or ';' in /home/rbase/public_html/client/views/VM1_1.0.0/temp7.php on line 4

Can you not declare arrays in the body of a class?

If you could explain the reason behind this, and maybe the top three things to look out for which can nip me on the butt when writing classes.

Sincerely,
Sam Fullman

[saintp]

Are you familiar with Java at all? That might help.

You can't specify arrays in the body of a class because PHP's OO engine is not sophisticated enough (as of v. 4) to cope with static data. In Java you could do something like this:

public class Foo {
static {
int[5] bar;
bar[0] = 1;
...
}
}

But you can't do that in PHP. It appears that a static-block feature is not planned for PHP 5, either, so you'll need to find a different way to do this.

One way, since PHP is not intrinsically and totally OO like java, would be to declare your static variables outside the scope of the object; that is, just put the $user array outside the class declaration. If, on the other hand, you need the $user array to be instance data, put the initialization inside the constructor.