The protagonist of today’s “PHP Design Patterns” series is the Iterator pattern, which provides an abstraction on a very common process: a set of objects (or scalars) located in an unknown part of the object graph. Iterate. Iteration can be performed in several different ways: iterating over array properties, collection objects, arrays, or even a query result set.
In the world of objects, the iterator pattern should maintain array-like functions and be regarded as a non-intrusive object facet. The Client class is often separated from the real object implementation and refers to the iterator interface. Whenever possible, we can pass a reference to the iterator instead of a concrete or abstract class that may change in the future.
Figure 1 Iterator pattern
Participants:
◆Client: Methods that reference the iterator pattern perform a loop on a set of values or objects.
◆Iterator (Iterator): Abstraction on the iteration process, including next(), isFinished(), current() and other methods.
◆ConcreteIterators: Implement iteration on a specific set of objects, such as arrays, trees, combinations, collections, etc.
Through the Traversable interface, PHP natively supports the iterator mode. This interface is extended by Iterator and IteratorAggregate. These two sub-interfaces not only define a set of standard methods, but each Traversable object can be passed intact Foreach(), foreach is the main client of iterators, the Iterator implementation is the real iterator, and the IteratorAggregate is a Traversable object with other responsibilities, which returns an Iterator through the getIterator() method.
The Standard PHP Library is the only general-purpose object-oriented library bundled in PHP, defining additional interfaces and public classes. The OuterIterator implementation decorates an Iterator. CachingIterator and LimitIterator are two examples of this interface.
RecursiveIterator is an extension of the Iterator interface implemented for tree structures. It defines a set of additional methods to check whether the sub-object of the current element in the iteration exists. RecursiveArrayIterator and RecursiveDirectoryIterator are examples of implementations of this interface. These types of iterators can be used as-is, or bridged to a regular iterator contract using a RecursiveIteratorIterator. This OuterIterator implementation will perform depth-first or breadth-first traversal depending on the construction parameters.
When using RecursiveIteratorIterator, you can pass it to foreach, please see the following code examples to understand the different uses of RecursiveIterators and their superset Iterator. Finally, SeekableIterators adds a seek() method to the contract, which can be used to move the Iterator's internal state to a specific iteration point.