PHP 5 Power Programming

3.4. The new Keyword and Constructors

Instances of classes are created using the new keyword. In the previous example, we created a new instance of the Person class using $judy = new Person();. What happens during the new call is that a new object is allocated with its own copies of the properties defined in the class you requested, and then the constructor of the object is called in case one was defined. The constructor is a method named __construct(), which is automatically called by the new keyword after creating the object. It is usually used to automatically perform various initializations such as property initializations. Constructors can also accept arguments, in which case, when the new statement is written, you also need to send the ...