What is the PHP static method?
Overview
A method is simply a code block that carries out certain functions and can be called or reused. A static method is a function that resides inside a class and is declared using the static keyword.
In the static method, we don’t need to create an instance of the class before accessing the method. Let’s see an example:
Example
<?php/* Use static */class speak {public static function opinion() {echo 'Educative is the Best';}}speak::opinion();
Code explanation
To use an object in a class, we need to instantiate the class using the new keyword. However, we don’t need to instantiate the speak class to access a static method. As seen above, we just need to call the class and access the static method using the ::.
- Line 4: We create a class,
speak.
- Line 6: We create the static method,
opinion(), using thestatickeyword whose access modifier ispublic.
- Line 7: We print the output, "
Educative is the best."
- Line 11: We then access the
speak::opinion()method that executes theopinion()method. This prints the output.