Question

I’m trying to create a variable and name it after the content of another variable.
For example

$newname = "x";
//dosomething to create the variable $x

Answer 1

They are called variable-variables:

${$newname} = 'stuff';

If you have more, consider using an array and extract variables from it:

$vars = array(...);     // keys = variable name, value = variable value
extract($vars, EXTR_SKIP);