Question

The manual on “extract” shows you can extract an array like:

extract(array('one'=>1,'two'=>2));

into $one,$two…

But the extract function doesn’t return the variables. Is there a way to ‘globalize’ these variables? Maybe not using extract, but a foreach loop?

EDIT: (explanation about what I’m trying to achieve)
I have an array containing hundreds of output messages which I want to have accessible as variables efficiently. What I mean is that whenever I want to output a message, say:

$englishMessages = array('helloWorld'=>'Hello World');
$spanishMessages = array('helloWorld'=>'Hola Mundo');
'<span id="some">'. $helloWorld .'</span>';

The message would appear. The reason I’m doing it like this is so that users can change the language they’re viewing the website in, so something like:
”. $helloWorld .”;
would produce:

Hola Mundo!

Answer 1

Not exactly an answer to your question …but: Keep the array, don’t pollute the (global) variable namespace.

$englishMessages = array('helloWorld'=>'Hello World');
$spanishMessages = array('helloWorld'=>'Hola Mundo');

// wrap this in a nice function/method
$lang = $englishMessages;
// then use $lang for the output
'<span id="some">'. $lang['helloWorld'] .'</span>';

Some variations on the same theme:

function getMessages($language) {
  static $l = array(
    'en'=> array('helloWorld'=>'Hello World'),
    'es' => array('helloWorld'=>'Hola Mundo')
  );
  // <-- add handling reporting here -->
  return $l[$language];
}

$lang = getMessages('en');
echo '<span id="some">'. $lang['helloWorld'] .'</span>';

or

function __($language, $id) {
  static $l = array(
    'en'=> array('helloWorld'=>'Hello World'),
    'es' => array('helloWorld'=>'Hola Mundo')
  );
  // <-- add error handling here -->
  return $l[$language][$id];
}

echo '<span id="some">'. __('es', 'helloWorld') .'</span>';

You might also be interested in http://docs.php.net/gettext