If you’ve worked in a lot of codebases, this scenario will be familiar: somewhere in the app, we’re JSON-decoding a string, then using that to pass arguments to a method (such as a constructor). It may look something like this:

$json = '{"first": "Steve", "last": "Grunwell"}';
$data = json_decode($json);

$person = new Person($data->first, $data->last);

I’d like to humbly ask that you stop doing this. Instead, this post is going to show you how to accomplish the same result with a static, factory method and explain why the latter approach will save you all sorts of headaches.

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