[RESOLVED] Enforce strict method naming?

bretticus

Hi folks,

Thanks for reading this...

I was wondering if anyone knew how to enforce a naming convention for class methods. I have written a very basic MVC framework for a project I am about to undertake. Due to strict SEO-friendly guidelines in URI convention that I'm being forced to implement, I need a way to throw an exception if a future developer tries to name a controller action ( aka: class method) with a hypen or dash (-). I have an abstract class for my controllers base class. Just wondering if there was some "magic" way to do this. My class that grabs the configuration out of the URL defaults to index class controller and index action (index method under index class.)

My fear is that, because I have to tack a geographic moniker before my controller call in the URL, if I were to have a future developer create a "do-cartwheels" action that my code may mistakenly try and call the cartwheels action in my index controller instead of the do-cartwheels action in my index controller.

While I'm writing this I think I'm more and more convinced, this should be abstracted out via mod_rewrite. Any thoughts appreciated.

Thanks again.

NogDog

As per http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.functions.php:
[indent]A valid function name starts with a letter or underscore, followed by any number of letters, numbers, or underscores.[/indent]
So the parser will not let them define a method with an underscore in the function name.

bretticus

You know it just dawned on me that I have never actually tried to name a function with a dash before 😉 I will check that out to make sure it's true. Thanks!

bretticus

Oh boy, there's a long question I could have saved you reading by actually trying to do what I feared. Okay, looks like dashes have the go-ahead. 😛

laserlight

Yeah, I've been looking through the PHP manual to find a way to subvert the method naming rules like how we can subvert the variable naming rules with variable variable syntax. I could not find such a way, so I am pretty sure that method names cannot contain dashes.

bretticus

Thanks for your input NogDog and laserlight. This just confirms my suspicion that this is the best technical forum in existence. 🙂

Weedpacket

No, method names can't contain hyphens (the call would parse as "object-property minus global-function-call"), but

function Ð€ªÐß€€ƒ(){}

and hence $foo->Ð€ªÐß€€ƒ() is legal, if that might be a concern for you.

Actually, now that I think about it the problem is the opposite; it would hardly be the fault of your design if they choose to use a method name that won't even fit in a URL without encoding (or might you allow for urldecoding the method name?).