How do I autoload classes that have a file name different from the class name?

Question

I have seen these,

How to autoload class with a different filename? PHP

Load a class with a different name than the one passed to the autoloader as argument

I can change but in my MV* structure I have:

/models
    customer.class.php
    order.class.php
/controllers
    customer.controller.php
    order.controller.php
/views
...

In the actually classes they are,

class CustomerController {}
class OrderController{}
class CustomerModel{}
class OrderModel{}

I was trying to be consistent with the names. If I do not put the class name suffix (Controller, Model), I cannot load the class because that is redeclaring.

If I keep the names of my classes, autoload fails because it will look for a class file named

CustomerController

when the file name is really,

customer.controller.php

Are my only ways to (in no order):

• use create_alias
• rename my files (customer.model.php to customermodel.php)
• rename my classes
• use regular expressions
• use a bootstrap with included files (include, require_once, etc.)

?

Example code,

function model_autoloader($class) {
    include MODEL_PATH . $class . '.model.php';
}

spl_autoload_register('model_autoloader');

It seems I have to rename files,

http://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-4/

"The terminating class name corresponds to a file name ending in .php. The file name MUST match the case of the terminating class name."

Answer 1

Looks to me this can be handled with some basic string manipulation and some conventions.

define('CLASS_PATH_ROOT', '/');

function splitCamelCase($str) {
  return preg_split('/(?<=\\w)(?=[A-Z])/', $str);
}

function makeFileName($segments) {
    if(count($segments) === 1) { // a "model"
        return CLASS_PATH_ROOT . 'models/' . strtolower($segments[0]) . '.php';
    }
    
    // else get type/folder name from last segment
    $type = strtolower(array_pop($segments));
    
    if($type === 'controller') {
        $folderName = 'controllers';
    }
    else {
        $folderName = $type;
    }
    
    $fileName = strtolower(join($segments, '.'));
    
    return CLASS_PATH_ROOT . $folderName . '/' . $fileName . '.' . $type . '.php';
}

$classNames = array('Customer', 'CustomerController');

foreach($classNames as $className) {
    $parts = splitCamelCase($className);
    
    $fileName = makeFileName($parts);
    
    echo $className . ' -> '. $fileName . PHP_EOL;
}

The output is

Customer -> /models/customer.php

CustomerController -> /controllers/customer.controller.php

You now need to use makeFileName inside the autoloader function.

I myself am strongly against stuff like this. I'd use namespaces and file names that reflect the namespace and class name. I'd also use Composer.

(I found splitCamelCase here.)