Question

Note: I don’t think this question has much to do with PHP’s eval.

In Tcl, eval takes a list, using the first item as the function (proc) name, and the rest of the items as arguments, e.g.

eval [list foobar arg1 arg2 arg3]

is equivalent to

foobar arg1 arg2 arg3

In PHP, both call_user_func and call_user_func_array require at least two parameters: (1) the function name, and (2) either the arguments or an array of the arguments, respectively.

Is there a similar function in PHP that takes only one parameter?

I wrote my own, as shown below, but I’d prefer a native method.

function call_user_array(array $a) {
    return call_user_func_array(array_shift($a), $a);
}

Thanks in advance for any hints.

P.S. Not sure if “lambda” has anything to do with this but the word comes to mind for some reason: would someone more knowledgeable please remove the tag if it’s not actually relevant, as well as this note? Thanks again!

Answer 1

No, there is nothing built-in to do that. Since it can be implemented in one line (just like you did it) there’s also not much reason to consider including one.