Question

Trying to create a variable with unique name for each $item.

To prevent error “Only variables can be passed by reference”.

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If there are 5 items in array $items, we should get 5 unique variables:

$item_name_1;
$item_name_2;
$item_name_3;
$item_name_4;
$item_name_5;

All of them should be empty.

What is a true solution for this?

Answer 1

You can dynamically create variable names doing the following:

$item_name_{$count} = $whatever;

I must warn you though, this is absolutely bad style and I’ve never seen a good reason to use this. In almost every use case an array would be the better solution.