Laravel 5 Failed opening required bootstrap/../vendor/autoload.php

Turns out I didn't enable openssl in my php.ini so when I created my new project with composer it was installed from source. I changed that and ran

composer update

now the vendor folder was created.

The var_dump() output is correct. $xml->StatusCode is a SimpleXMLElement instance. This is of course needed in case you have to, for example, add a child element to it:

$xml->StatusCode->addChild("test", "value");

If $xml->StatusCode contained only the value of the element rather than an instance of SimpleXMLElement, you wouldn't be able to do any modifications on the loaded XML.

So, what you need to do, is cast the value of StatusCode to a string. There are various ways of doing this:

var_dump($xml->StatusCode); // returns SimpleXMLElement instance
var_dump((string)$xml->StatusCode); // explicitly
var_dump($xml->StatusCode->__toString()); // explicitly, calling the magic function
echo $xml->StatusCode; // implicitly

Some demos

I don't think it's possible to use only function when you have code in your classes. Well, you could try with extending Blade but it's too much.

What you should do is creating one extra file, for example appHelpershelpers.php and in your composer.json file put:

"autoload": {
    "classmap": [
        "database"
    ],
    "psr-4": {
        "App\": "app/"
    },
    "files": ["app/Helpers/helpers.php"] // <- this line was added
},

create app/Helpers/helpers.php file and run

composer dump-autoload

Now in your app/Helpers/helpers.php file you could add those custom functions for example like this:

if (! function_exists('fooBar')) {
   function fooBar() 
   {
      return AppHelpersCustomHelper::fooBar();
   }
}

so you define global functions but in fact all of them might use specific public methods from some classes.

By the way this is exactly what Laravel does for its own helpers for example:

if (! function_exists('array_add')) {
    function array_add($array, $key, $value)
    {
        return Arr::add($array, $key, $value);
    }
}

as you see array_add is only shorter (or maybe less verbose) way of writing Arr::add