classes/phing/types/Path.php

This class has been adopted from the Java Ant equivalent. The ability have path structures in Phing is important; however, because of how PHP classes interact the ability to specify CLASSPATHs makes less sense than Java.Rather than providing CLASSPATH for any tasks that take classes as parameters, perhaps a better solution in PHP is to have an IncludePath task, which prepends paths to PHP's include_path INI variable. This gets around the problem that simply using a path to load the initial PHP class is not enough (in most cases the loaded class may assume that it is on the global PHP include_path, and will try to load dependent classes accordingly). The other option is to provide a way for this class to add paths to the include path, if desired -- or to create an IncludePath subclass. Once added, though, when would a path be removed from the include path?

<

p> <sometask>
  <somepath>
    <pathelement location="/path/to/file" />
    <pathelement path="/path/to/class2;/path/to/class3" />
    <pathelement location="/path/to/file3" />
  </somepath>
</sometask>


<

p> The object implemention sometask must provide a method called createSomepath which returns an instance of Path. Nested path definitions are handled by the Path object and must be labeled pathelement.

<

p>

The path element takes a parameter path which will be parsed and split into single elements. It will usually be used to define a path from an environment variable.