Question

I’m building an XML page inside of a function, and for some strange reason I don’t get the whole thing spit out of the function. I’ve tried

return $thisXml; } echo $thisXML; 

and I only get the xml declaration which is in the variable before the function. If i put an echo in the function, i get everything back as I should.

my page essentially looks like this

$thisXml = 'xml declaration stuff';  function getThisXML($thisXML){   for(i=1; i<5; i++){   $query 'has the 5 in it';    while ($mysqlQuery =mysql_fetch_array($theQuery) {     $thisXml.='add the xml';   }   $thisXml.='close the last element';   return $thisXml; }  echo $thisXml; 

as i said, if I replace the ‘return’ with ‘echo’, I get all the nice xml. if I echo outside the function, I only get the original declaration.

really strange, and i’ve been struggling with this one all day.

Answer 1

return $thisXml; } echo $thisXML; 

$thisXML; only exists in the scope of the function. Either make $thisXML; global (bad idea) or echo getThisXML() where getThisXML is the function that returns $thisXML;