The “magic” methods are ones with special names, starting with two underscores, which denote methods which will be triggered in response to particular PHP events. That might sound slightly automagical but actually it’s pretty straightforward, we already saw an example of this in the last post, where we used a constructor – so we’ll use this as our first example.

PHP functions that start with a double underscore – a “__” – are called magic functions (and/or methods) in PHP. They are functions that are always defined inside classes, and are not stand-alone (outside of classes) functions. The magic functions available in PHP are: __construct(), __destruct(), __call(), __callStatic(), __get(), __set(), __isset(), __unset(), __sleep(), __wakeup(), __toString(), __invoke(), __set_state(), __clone(), and __autoload().

• Initializing or uninitializing object data
• Processing access to undefined methods or properties
• Converting objects to string representation

Exception::__toString gives the String representation of the exception.

The set_time_limit(0) added at the beginning of a script sets to infinite the time of execution to not have the PHP error ‘maximum execution time exceeded’.It is also possible to specify this in the php.ini file.

PHP and Javascript cannot directly interacts since PHP is a server side language and Javascript is a client side language. However we can exchange variables since PHP is able to generate Javascript code to be executed by the browser and it is possible to pass specific variables back to PHP via the URL.