Attributes: Some Basics

Programmers can invent a new kind of declarative information, called an attribute. Attributes can be attached to various program entities, and information about those attributes can be retrieved at run-time via reflection (see library class Reflection, et al). Consider the following example:

<<Help("http://www.MyOnlineDocs.com/Widget.html")>>
class Widget {
  ...
}

$rc = new \ReflectionClass('Widget');
$attrHelp = $rc->getAttribute('Help');

An attribute is specified inside << ... >>.

The method getAttribute returns an array containing the values corresponding to an attribute, in lexical order of their specification. As the Help attribute on class Widget has only one value, a string, array element 0 is the string containing that string, in this case, a URL at which the corresponding help information can be found.

A number of predefined attributes affect the way in which source code is compiled.