How can I call a static method from a class if all I have is a string of the class name?

Question

How would I get something like this to work?

$class_name = 'ClassPeer';
$class_name::doSomething();

Answer 1

Reflection (PHP 5 supports it) is how you'd do this. Read that page and you should be able to figure out how to invoke the function like that.

$func = new ReflectionFunction('somefunction');
$func->invoke();

Documentation Link

Answer 2

Use call_user_func. Also read up on PHP callbacks.

call_user_func(array($class_name, 'doSomething'), $arguments);

Answer 3

Depending on version of PHP:

call_user_func(array($class_name, 'doSomething'));
call_user_func($class_name .'::doSomething'); // >5.2.3