PHP[OOP] - How to call class constructor manually?

Question

Please see the code bellow:

01. class Test {
02.     public function __construct($param1, $param2, $param3) {
03.         echo $param1.$param2.$param3;
04.     }
05. }
06. 
07. $params = array('p1','p2','p3');
08. 
09. $ob = new Test;
10. 
11. if(method_exists($ob,'__construct')) {
12.     call_user_func_array(array($ob,'__construct'),$params);
13. }

Now, the problem is the constructor is called in line 09

But i want to call it manually at line 11-13

Is it possible? If then how? Any idea please?

Answer 1

It is not possible to prevent the constructor from being called when the object is constructed (line 9 in your code). If there is some functionality that happens in your __construct() method that you wish to postpone until after construction, you should move it to another method. A good name for that method might be init().

Why not just do this?

class Test {
    public function __construct($param1, $param2, $param3) {
        echo $param1.$param2.$param3;
    }
}

$ob = new Test('p1', 'p2', 'p3');

EDIT: I just thought of a hacky way you could prevent a constructor from being called (sort of). You could subclass Test and override the constructor with an empty, do-nothing constructor.

class SubTest extends Test {
    public function __construct() {
        // don't call parent::__construct()
    }

    public function init($param1, $param2, $param3) {
        parent::__construct($param1, $param2, $param3);
    }
}

$ob = new SubTest();
$ob->init('p1', 'p2', 'p3');

This is might make sense if you're dealing with some code that you cannot change for some reason and need to work around some annoying behavior of a poorly written constructor.