PHP – Inheritance and Overload in a Class

Have you ever dreamt to understand the inheritance and the overload from once 5 minute example? No such dreams? Anyway, in case you ever tend to think about it, here is the example with PHP.

Let’s imagine that we have two classes – a normal person and an athlete. The normal person has name, age and city, and the athlete has all of those plus a bunch of sports he is good at. Thus, the athlete inherits the person 🙂

Furthermore, they both have a method called “get_information”. Thus, if you want to get the information for the person, you receive a small string about his name and city and for the athlete you receive name, city, age and sports in a nice green table.

Like in the example below:

How was this achieved? With the beautiful code below:

<?
class Person{
        public $name;
        public $age;
        public $city;
    
    public function get_information(){
        return "<i>".$this->name."</i> is from ".$this->city.".";  
    }
}

class Athlete extends Person{
    public $sports = array();
    
    public function get_information(){
        $str_information = "<i>".$this->name."</i> is an athlete from ".$this->city.". ";
        $str_information .= "The athlete is ".$this->age." years old. ";
        $str_information .= "The athlete is good in the following sports: <br/>";
        $str_information .= "<table bgcolor=#00FF00 border = 2>";
        foreach($this->sport as $one_sport){
            $str_information .= "<tr><td>$one_sport</td></tr>"; 
        }
        $str_information .= "</table>";
        return $str_information;
    }
    
}

$person = new Person;
$person->name = "Vitosh";
$person->city = "Sofia";
$person->age = 29; //still!:)
echo $person->get_information();
echo "<hr>";

$athlete = new Athlete;
$athlete->name = "Vityata";
$athlete->city = "Druzhba city";
$athlete->age = 28; 
$athlete->sport = array("WC3","WC3 - TFT", "Civilization III","Quake 3","AOE","Collin McRea Rally 2");
echo $athlete->get_information();
?>

Available also in GitHub.

Enjoy it!