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Asked: 2026-05-12T07:28:09+00:00

The reason I am asking this question is because I have landed my first

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The reason I am asking this question is because I have landed my first real (yes, a paid office job – no more volunteering!) Web Development job about two months ago. I have a couple of associates in computer information systems (web development and programming). But as many of you know, what you learn in college and what you need in the job site can be very different and much more. I am definitely learning from my job – I recreated the entire framework we use from scratch in a MVC architecture – first time doing anything related to design patterns.

I was wondering what you would recommend as the best way to pass/return values around in OO PHP? Right now I have not implement any sort of standard, but I would like to create one before the size of the framework increases any more. I return arrays when more than 1 value needs to get return, and sometimes pass arrays or have multiple parameters. Is arrays the best way or is there a more efficient method, such as json? I like the idea of arrays in that to pass more values or less, you just need to change the array and not the function definition itself.

Thank you all, just trying to become a better developer.

EDIT: I’m sorry all, I thought I had accepted an answer for this question. My bad, very, very bad.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    How often do you run across a situation where you actually need multiple return values? I can’t imagine it’s that often.

    And I don’t mean a scenario where you are returning something that’s expected to be an enumerable data collection of some sort (i.e., a query result), but where the returned array has no other meaning that to just hold two-or-more values.

    One technique the PHP library itself uses is reference parameter, such as with preg_match(). The function itself returns a single value, a boolean, but optionally uses the supplied 3rd parameter to store the matched data. This is, in essence, a "second return value".

    Definitely don’t use a data interchange format like JSON. the purpose of these formats is to move data between disparate systems in an expected, parse-able way. In a single PHP execution you don’t need that.

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