Calling other function in the same controller?
Stefan Izdrail
Founder & Senior Architect · 2026-06-29
Title: Calling Other Functions in the Same Controller: A Comprehensive Guide to Avoiding Errors in Laravel Controllers
As a developer, you might occasionally need to call functions from within the same controller in your Laravel application. However, the process can sometimes come with its challenges, leading to errors such as "Call to undefined function" like the one described in the initial post. This guide aims to address this issue and provide best practices for calling other functions within the same controller efficiently and without any errors.
Let's first understand why you might encounter the error "Call to undefined function." The error occurs when you try to call a function that doesn't exist or is not defined in your current scope, which can be either the global scope or another class method. In this case, it seems like you have defined functions within your controller but are facing issues when calling them from other functions.
To resolve the issue and successfully call other functions within the same controller, follow these steps:
1. Define all functions in a single class. This ensures that they all exist within the same scope and can be called easily without any conflicts. Place your controller code inside a class like `InstagramController` as shown below:
<?php
class InstagramController extends BaseController {
public function read($q)
{
$client_id = 'ea7bee895ef34ed08eacad639f515897';
$uri = 'https://api.instagram.com/v1/tags/'.$q.'/media/recent?client_id='.$client_id;
return sendRequest($uri);
}
public function sendRequest($uri)
{
$curl = curl_init($uri);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
$response = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
return $response;
}
}