Working within the Object with $this

This episode covers a hard topic for most OOP newbies to grasp: the concept of accessing an object’s internal properties and methods using the PHP reserved pseudo-variable $this. Each object uses the class blueprint as its code. Within the object itself, you reference that object’s properties and methods using $this. For example, let’s say you wanted to check the first name on a User object. You would do:

$this->first_name

within the object itself. Look at that code. Internally within the object, the variable $this refers to the object that you are working with. It’s just that one object and not any of the others.

Externally within the application, you use the variable that represents the object. For example:

$sally = new User();

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