PHP 5 Power Programming

3.11. instanceof Operator

The instanceof operator was added as syntactic sugar instead of the already existing is_a() built-in function (which is now deprecated). Unlike the latter, instanceof is used like a logical binary operator:

class Rectangle {
    public $name = __CLASS__;
}

class Square extends Rectangle {
    public $name = __CLASS__;
}

class Circle {
    public $name = __CLASS__;
}

function checkIfRectangle($shape)
{
    if ($shape instanceof Rectangle) {
        print $shape->name;
        print " is a rectangle\n";
    }
}

checkIfRectangle(new Square());
checkIfRectangle(new Circle());

This small program prints 'Square is a rectangle\n'. Note the use of __CLASS__, which is a special constant that resolves to the name of the current class.

As previously mentioned, ...