What is the return type of a method that returns Heredoc?

Question

I have some PHP code that looks like this:

class MyClass
{
    public static function classPhpdoc($paramA)
    {
        return <<<PHP
/** @template-extends \\$baseClass */

PHP;
    }
}

It's basically a class with multiple methods that return Heredoc blocks.

I'm using phpstan tool to validate the code and it's complaining that the methods have no return-type specified.

My question is: what return type would be appropiate to specify in such cases? I was thinking either string or mixed but I'm not sure.

Answer 1

Heredoc is not a type, it's a syntax to produce strings:

var_dump(<<<PHP
Hello, World!
PHP
);

string(13) "Hello, World!"

So:

public static function classPhpdoc($paramA): string