Ruby equivalent to PHP's $this

Question

What is the equivalent of PHP's $this-> in Ruby?

Answer 1

The ruby equivalent of this is self - they both refer to the current instance.

The tricky part is that in Ruby class scope, self refers to the current instance of the class Class that defines the class you are building. Inside a method, self refers to the instance of the class.

eg:

class Example
  puts self  # => "Example" - the stringified class object

  def foo
    puts self  # #<Example:0xdeadbeef> - the stringified instance
  end
end

Answer 2

The analog of $this is self, as has been mentioned. However, you asked about $this->, which means you want to use it to access an instance variable ($this->somevar) or instance method (this->somemethod()). For an instance variable, the equivalent in Ruby would be @ (as in @somevar). For instance methods, the equivalent would be to just write the method name (somemethod), or, if you like to be verbose (self.somemethod).