Can you get a method name from within a method in PHP?

Question

Is it possible to do something like this?

public function something() {

    $thisMethodName = method_get_name(); // I made that function up, but is there some way of doing what it describes?

}

Thanks

Answer 1

Why can't you do this?

public function something() {
    $thisMethodName = "something";
}

Answer 2

Sure, you want the magic constants.

function myFunction() { print __FUNCTION__." in ".__FILE__." at ".__LINE__."\n"; }

Find out more from the php manual

Answer 3

Hackish, but you could also probably dig it out of the debug_backtrace() return value.

Answer 4

While you can use the magic constant "__METHOD__", I would highly recommend checking out php's reflection. This is supported in PHP5.

$modelReflector = new ReflectionClass(__CLASS__);
$method = $modelReflector->getMethod(__METHOD__);

You can then do kick ass stuff like inspect the signature, etc.

Answer 5

I think aswering such questions should include some mentoring. _ FUNCTION _ is supposed to be used in debugging purposes. Using it in other cases in questionable. I suggest author to describe the task he wants to achieve with this "do I know what my name is" thing. And we will help him invent some more acceptable solution.

Answer 6

As smartj suggested you can try the magic constant __METHOD__, but remember that this will return a string containing also your class name, i.e. 'MyClass::something'. Using __FUNCTION__ instead will return 'something'.