Question

For instance:

// somefile.php
function doSomething() {
    // do lots of code, whatever...
    return $something;
}

// mainfile.php
include "somefile.php"
doSomething(); // ignored the return value, we don't need it here

What happens when a function in PHP returns a value but we don’t care about it? Is something wrong with this behavior or should we always get the variable even if we’ll never used it outside the function scope? How does PHP manage it’s resources by returning a value that won’t be used outside of the function scope?

Answer 1

The return value is discarded. There is nothing wrong with doing that. Even functions without an explicit return do return null implicitly:

function foo() {}
var_dump(foo());  // NULL