Question

I have a function which takes in about 10 arguments, in which most of them are optional. I was wondering if I could implement it in such a way that the user of the function does not need to bother with the order of the parameters.
For example:

public function foo($arg1, $arg2, $arg3='',$arg4='', $arg5='', $arg6='', $arg7=''){}

Now, when I use this function I can simply

$this->foo($arg1val, $arg2val, $arg6val);

Is there a way in php to do so?

Here is how I implemented this:
I’ve listed the parameters accepted by the function in the API, so the user can pass the parameters in any order in an array with key=>value pairs.

For example:

public function argumentsFilter($origParams, $newParams){
    $tmpArr = array();
        foreach ($origParams as $origKey){
        foreach($newParams as $newKey => $newVal){
                    if($newKey == $origKey){
                $tmpArr[$origKey] = $newVal;
                    }
        }
        if(empty($tmpArr[$origKey])){
                    $tmpArr[$origKey] = '';
        }
           }
        return $tmpArr;
}

public function foo($arg1, $arg2, $arg=array()){

    $validArgList = array('arg3', 'arg4', 'arg5', 'arg6', 'arg7');

    $correctedArgList = $this->argumentsFilter($validArgList, $arg);   

}

Is there a more elegant way to do this?

Answer 1

10 parameters for a function is clearly too much. Pass arrays instead:

function foo(array $params) {
    $defaults = array('foo' => true, 'bar' => false, ...);
    $params = array_intersect_key($params, $defaults) + $defaults;

    // work with $params['foo']
    // maybe extract($params)
}

This example shows a function that accepts an arbitrary number of “named parameter” in any order, filters invalid values and establishes defaults values.