Cannot Use Dynamic Class Name

It seems I’ve discovered a new kind of PHP error that isn’t documented anywhere on the web yet. Here is a simple example and explanation to help correct your code.

class MyClass {}
$obj = new MyClass;
$test1 = MyClass::class;    // Right
$test2 = get_class( $obj ); // Right
$test3 = $obj::class;       // Wrong

That last line in my code sample produces the following error in PHP 7.4.

Fatal error: Cannot use ::class with dynamic class name in […][…] on line 5

This is the PHP way of saying that you have to switch to the get_class() function when retrieving the fully qualified class name of an object.

Note: An existing RFC proposes to change this behavior in PHP 8, so this particular error message might not exist in some future versions.