What does '$foo->bar' mean?

[Capoeirista]

Hi There -

Am trying to grok Drupal right now, and I just cannot proceed any further without understanding this. I see a lot of this: $foo->bar

I've searched the manual, and it won't return anything for this type of structure, or I'm not good at searching.

I know about the array key=>value pair thing, but I haven't been able to figure this one out.

Can anyone help me by either telling me what it's called so I can search for it in the manual or giving me a link to the manual page that explains it??

Thanks,

Lee

[ClarkF1]

It's the classes and objects side of PHP

More info: http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.oop.php

[zabmilenko]

The $foo->bar is demonstrating how classes work.

First, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable for the backgrounder.

What this construct is demonstrating is that if you had a class named $foo, you would access the property bar by going $foo->bar.

Lets say I have an authorization system with a class called $users and I wanted the username. I would go $user->username or similar. $foo->bar is demonstrating the construct.

Take a look at http://us3.php.net/zend-engine-2.php to see how objects in php work.

EDIT: Sorry clark, I think we were typing at nearly the same time...

[thorpe]

Its gonna be kinda hard to grok Drupal if you dont grok objects in php.