Reflection

Reflection is a highly important concept every developer should be wary about. It denotes the ability of a program to inspect itself during runtime, thus allowing easy reverse-engineering of classes, interfaces, functions, methods, and extensions.

We can get a quick taste of the PHP reflection capabilities right from the console. The PHP CLI supports several reflection-based commands:

• --rf <function name>: This shows information about a function
• --rc <class name>: This shows information about a class
• --re <extension name>: This shows information about an extension
• --rz <extension name>: This shows information about the Zend extension
• --ri <extension name>: This shows the configuration for an extension

The following output demonstrates the result of the php --rf str_replace command:

Function [ <internal:standard> function str_replace ] {
  - Parameters [4] {
     Parameter #0 [ <required> $search ]
     Parameter #1 [ <required> $replace...