Aug
14

Enums in PHP

Drew PHP 2 comments

I’ve been working on a project lately where I’m rolling my own basic role-based access control (RBAC) system. In experimenting with different ways to handle the role definitions, I realized that it’d be pretty nice to have a basic enum() function or construct, as a quick, convenient way to define a set of constants. There’s this option:

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< ?php
    define('ADMIN', 0);
    define('MODERATOR', 1);
    define('EDITOR', 2);
?>

but that isn’t exactly succinct. I’d rather have something like this:

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< ?php
    enum('ADMIN', 'MODERATOR', 'EDITOR');
    // ADMIN == 0 (true)
    // MODERATOR == 1 (true), etc.
?>

You can kind of mimic the enumerated values with arrays like so:

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