Question

Supposing the following function and call:

function doSomething( &$someArray ) {
    // Do something to $someArray
}

$names=array("John", "Paul", "George", "Ringo");
doSomething($names);

Is there any way to get the name of the referenced array (in this case “names”) from within the function? I know that I could refactor to add another argument to the function for the name of the array variable, but that is just inviting bugs. The use case is that for each array $someSillyName the function needs to access the database table someSillyName.

Thanks.

Answer 1

There is no way to do this in PHP.

Moreover, you should avoid to use variable names for application logic. Imagine, someone refactors your $name to something else.. You could amend your array like this:

$dbData = array(
    'names' => array("John", "Paul", "George", "Ringo")
);

This should also help you in other parts of your application. If you really want to go this way, I’d recommend to create a Class that encapsulates this array and provides stuff like getDatabaseName(); and getData();