Handle Exception with Reflection Class in PHP

As PHP has already become the most used programming language on the web, so nowadays, a lot of frameworks are seen to be built in PHP programming language. There are a lot of customizable blogging and e-commerce frameworks that are built in PHP. So, there emerges a need to handle the exceptions that could be caused by the miscoded extensions for a framework. In order to handle those exceptions, we have to use something that can handle the exception and also be showing the proper cause. This is where reflection class come into use.

A ReflectionClass in PHP is something that contains the information about a class as mentioned in PHP documentation. Although, it has many applications we are going to focus on the exception handling.

The syntax of reflection class:

// $class_name is the name of a class
// $reflection contains the information about $class_name class
$reflection = new ReflectionClass($class_name);

We could have a doubt while calling a method of a class, for that we can use this function of reflection class:

// $method_name is the name of the method to be checked
$reflection->hasMethod($method_name)

We can also find out the number of arguments in a method by using the below function.

$reflection->getMethod($method_name)->getNumberOfRequiredParameters()

Although, I have listed a very few, there are much more applications of ReflectionClass. You can learn about other functions of the ReflectionClass in the PHP Documentation.