What is public and why doesn't a PHP function work?

A

Alexander Bagirov2015-01-01 22:56:31

PHP

Alexander Bagirov, 2015-01-01 22:56:31

Good evening!
I am learning OOP in PHP at CodeCademy.
I got this code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Reconstructing the Person Class</title>
      <link type='text/css' rel='stylesheet' href='style.css'/>
  </head>
  <body>
      <p>
        <!-- Your code here -->
        <?php
            class Person {
                public $isAlive = true;
                public $firstname;
                public $lastname;
                public $age;
            }
            
            public function __construct($firstname, $lastname, $age) {
                $this->firstname = $firstname;
                $this->lastname = $lastname;
                $this->age = $age;
            }
            
            $teacher = new Person("boring", "12345", 12345);
            $student = new Person("Alex", "Bagirov", 15);
            
            echo $teacher->isAlive;
            
            public function greet() {
                return "Hello, my name is " . $this->firstname . " " . $this->lastname . ". Nice to meet you! :-)";
            }
            echo $teacher->greet();
            echo $student->greet();
        ?>
      </p>
    </body>
</html>

For some reason, the system accepted it as the right decision, but at the same time, the compiler displays the following error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PUBLIC on line 18

What is wrong here?
Tell me more, please, what is public?
For example, they said to write public before functions, but I didn’t find a special explanation of its meaning in the Codecademy theory. Thanks for the help.

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1 answer(s)

R

Reistlin, 2015-01-01
@alexbagirov

public function __construct must be defined in the class:

class Person {
                public $isAlive = true;
                public $firstname;
                public $lastname;
                public $age;
            
            public function __construct($firstname, $lastname, $age) {
                $this->firstname = $firstname;
                $this->lastname = $lastname;
                $this->age = $age;
            } 
}

also your greet method must be defined in the class, otherwise it will not work
. I advise you to read George Schlossnagle's books "Professional Programming" or Matt Zandstra's "PHP. Objects, Patterns and Programming Techniques", perhaps you will better understand what OOP is