Is there a way to emulate PHP5's __call() magic method in PHP4?

Question

PHP5 has a "magic method" __call()that can be defined on any class that is invoked when an undefined method is called -- it is roughly equivalent to Ruby's method_missing or Perl's AUTOLOAD. Is it possible to do something like this in older versions of PHP?

Answer 1

This article, Using Method Call Overloading in PHP 4 over on DevShed might help.

Answer 2

The most important bit that I was missing was that __call exists in PHP4, but you must enable it on a per-class basis by calling overload(), as seen in php docs here . Unfortunately, the __call() function signatures are different between PHP4 and PHP5, and there does not seem to be a way to make an implementation that will run in both.

Answer 3

I recall using it, and a little bit of googling suggests that

function __call($method_name, $parameters, &$return)
{
  $return_value = "You called ${method_name}!";
}

as a member function will do the job.