Question

In PHP you can dynamically create variables

$myarr = array('name'=>'Adam', 'age'=>22, 'sex'=>'male');
foreach ($myarr as $k=>$v)
    $$k = $v;

is there a way to pass a callback functionX and arrayX to another functionY, dynamically create variables from arrayX in functionY, and be able to reference those variables within functionX callback?

for example, I would like to:

function eachRecord($arr, $callback){
    foreach ($arr as $k=>$v) $$k = $v;
    $callback();
}
$myarr = array('name'=>'Adam', 'age'=>22, 'sex'=>'male');
eachRecord($myarr, function(){
   echo "{$name} is a {$sex} of age {$age}.";
});

i don’t want to have to pass variables back into the callback function, since i may not know the length or keys within the array, and i don’t want to pollute the global scope with unknown variable names because they are created dynamically.

is there any way to do this? closures?

thanks

Answer 1

No, it’s not possible. It’s not hard to work around like this though:

function callback($values) {
   extract($values);
   echo "{$name} is a {$sex} of age {$age}.";
}

callback($myArr);

You’re essentially only reinventing http://php.net/extract anyway.