Question

I was wondering if it’s possible to change and initialize variables in a function without passing arguments to the function. Here is what I want to achieve:

$foo = 'Lorem';
$array = array();
foobar($foo);
function foobar(){
    if (strlen($foo)== 1)
        $bar = 'Ipsum';
    else
        $array[] = 'error';
}

fubar();
function fubar(){
    if (empty($fouten))
        echo $bar;
}

Answer 1

$foo is a local (uninitialized) variable inside a function. It is different from the global variable $foo ($GLOBALS['foo']).

You have two ways:

$foo;
$bar;
$array = array();

function foobar(){
    global $foo, $array, $bar;
    if (strlen($foo)== 1)
        $bar = 'Ipsum';
    else
        $array[] = 'error';
}

or by using the $GLOBAL array …

This is not really good practice though and will become a maintenance nightmare with all those side effects