Simple PHP OOP syntax calling variables from a class method - php

Question

I'm mostly a designer and don't have a lot of experience with OOP in PHP, so please be kind as my terminology may not be exactly precise. It's the PHP/OOP syntax that I need the most help with, and I've searched for a solution several times here and on Google as I imagined this would be a pretty straight forward question but haven't found anything to help.
I'm trying to create a class method that pulls client account data from a database using the client's account ID. There are about 20 variables I want to pull and have access to on various pages on my site.
Here's my class file (classfile.php):
class Accounts{
// Function to get client data from database.
public function getAccount($acctId){
require("/var/www/vhosts/aqios.com/httpdocs/00omvat/dbinfo.php");
mysql_connect("localhost","user","password") or die();
mysql_select_db("database") or die();
$query = "SELECT * FROM clients WHERE id='$acctId' LIMIT 1";
$result = mysql_query($query) or die();
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){
$this->$firstName = $row["firstName"];
$this->$lastName = $row["lastName"];
$this->$address1 = $row["address1"];
$this->$address2 = $row["address2"];
$this->$city = $row["city"];
$this->$state = $row["state"];
//etc., etc.
}
mysql_close();
}
}
Here's one of my pages (index.php):
include_once('classfile.php');
$acctId = 111111;
$object = new Accounts();
$object->getAccount($acctId); //Script dies unless I comment this line out.
First of all, the script dies unless I comment out that last line, so something must be wrong with my syntax there. But what I really need to know is how to call and place the city or any other of these variables into my page? I don't know the proper syntax. I can't imagine it would be $object->getAccount($acctId)->$city. I know that's wrong. How would I call the city or any other variable from this object?
Also, I do know that I should be using another method to connect to my database, and I will do that once I get this figured out first.
Thank you in advance for any help you can offer!
Jason

Answer 1

This is incorrect
$this->$firstName = $row["firstName"];
^---remove the $
It should be
$this->firstName = $row['firstName'];
And the same for the subsequent lines.

Answer 2

As mentioned by others, you should use $this->firstName instead of $this->$firstName
$this refers to the object, not to the method
It will work without explicit initialization, but you should define for better reading all your object fields as public (or private/protected and write getter methods):
class Accounts {
public $firstName;
public $lastName
...
}
With variables defined as in 3, you should be able to refer to their values with $object->firstName
You should probably consider splitting classes into two - Accounts (as a DB proxy) and Account (as a single account data) and in Accounts->getAccount you will create Account object and return it - but this is more of a architectual discussion