NYCPHP Meetup

[John Lacey]

Chris Shiflett wrote:

> --- Daniel Porcher <danporcher at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
>>Is there a consensus about the use of variable variables?
> 
> 
> I don't think so. I know a lot of people who think it is bad practice.
> Their reasoning is never technical; it's social. They argue that variable
> variables are more likely to confuse another programmer who looks at your
> code, sort of like when you cram too many operations on a single line.
> 
> In my opinion, there are situations where it just happens to be the most
> elegant solution. But, I certainly feel outnumbered on this one. :-)


Daniel, here's a function from phpTest to illustrate:
(excuse the email formatting)

/**
* Registers global variables
*
* This function takes global namespace $HTTP_*_VARS 
variables from input and if they exist,
* register them as a global variable so that scripts can 
use them.  The first argument
* signifies where to pull the variable names from, and 
should be one of GET, POST, COOKIE, ENV, or SERVER.
*
*/
function pt_register()
{
     $num_args = func_num_args();
     $vars = array();

     if ($num_args >= 2) {
         $method = strtoupper(func_get_arg(0));

         if (($method != 'SESSION') && ($method != 'GET') 
&& ($method != 'POST') && ($method != 'SERVER') && ($method 
!= 'COOKIE') && ($method != 'ENV')) {
             die('The first argument of pt_register must be 
one of the following: GET, POST, SESSION, SERVER, COOKIE, 
or ENV');
         }

         $varname = "HTTP_{$method}_VARS";
         global ${$varname};

         for ($i = 1; $i < $num_args; $i++) {
             $parameter = func_get_arg($i);

             if (isset(${$varname}[$parameter])) {
                 global $$parameter;
                 $$parameter = ${$varname}[$parameter];
             }

         }

     } else {
         pt_exit('You must specify at least two arguments');
     }

}