Question

In Python and others, there’s special syntax for variable length argument lists:

def do_something(*args):
    # do something

do_something(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...) # arbitrarily long list

I was reading the PHP manual, and it said this:

PHP 4 and above has support for
variable-length argument lists in
user-defined functions. This is really
quite easy, using the func_num_args(),
func_get_arg(), and func_get_args()
functions.

No special syntax is required, and
argument lists may still be explicitly
provided with function definitions and
will behave as normal.

I get the first part. You can pass as many arguments as you’d like to a function that takes no arguments, then get them as an array using func_get_args(), etc. I don’t really get what the second part is saying, though.

So, my question is, is there some special syntax for variable length arguments, or some best practice that I don’t know about? The approach that the manual suggests seems kludgey at best and makes your function seem like it’s taking no arguments (unless I’m doing it wrong). Should I not be trying to use this language feature at all?

Answer 1

Unlike Python’s * operator or C#’s params keyword, in PHP you don’t even have to specify the variable length arguments. As the second part starts off, “No special syntax is required.”

As to the rest of the second paragraph: if you want to specify any required or unrelated arguments that come before the variable-length arguments, specify them in your function signature so your function can handle those. Then to get the variable-length arguments, remove the required variables from func_get_args(), like so:

function func($required) {
    // Contains all arguments that come after $required
    // as they were present at call time
    $args = array_slice(func_get_args(), 1);
}

You don’t have to do this (you can still slice from func_get_args() and use its different elements accordingly), but it does make your code more self-documenting.