Dynamically create PHP object based on string

But know of no way to dynamically create a type based on a string. How does one do this?

You can do it quite easily and naturally:

$type = 'myclass';$instance = new $type;

If your query is returning an associative array, you can assign properties using similar syntax:

// build object$type = $row['type'];$instance = new $type;// remove 'type' so we don't set $instance->type = 'foo' or 'bar'unset($row['type']);  // assign propertiesforeach ($row as $property => $value) {   $instance->$property = $value;}

There's a very neat syntax you can use that I learned about a couple of months ago that does not rely on a temporary variable. Here's an example where I use a POST variable to load a specific class:

$eb = new ${!${''} = $_POST['entity'] . 'Binding'}();

In your specific case though, you would be able to solve it by using PDO. It has a fetch mode that allows the first column's value to be the class the row instantiates into.

$sth->fetch(PDO::FETCH_CLASS | PDO::FETCH_CLASSTYPE);

$instance = new $classname; // i.e. $type in your case

Works very well...