Question

I have a question concerning the right way to pass an array to a function

After validating a form, I get an array of errors corresponding to each form field. i.e.

$errors = array(
    "First_Name" => "Missing first name",
    "Email" => "Invalid email address",
    ...
)

In order to display this errors I created a function

function print_error_message($field, $errors) {
    if($errors[$field])
        echo '<span class="error-msg">' . $errors[$field] . '</span>';
}

And I call this function after every html field to check whether this field has an error:

<input name="First_Name" value="<?php echo $First_Name ?>" />
<?php print_error_message("First_Name", $errors) ?>
...

So, since I have a lot of form fields, and a lot of errors, is it a good practice to pass ‘$errors’ array every time I call the function. Or should I use global or passing by reference?

Answer 1

It is fine to do it the way you are doing it. Certainly don’t use globals, and there’s no need to pass by reference either.

Instead of if($errors[$field]), you could use if (array_key_exists($field, $errors)).