Question

When writing controllers for Symfony 2, I often need to pass quite a few variables to the template like return array('param1' => $param1, 'anotherBigParam' => $anotherBigParam, 'yetAnotherParam' => $yetAnotherParam);

With many parameters this ends up really long and ugly, so I thought about creating a helper function for it:

public function indexAction()
{
    $param1 = 'fee';
    $anotherBigParam = 'foe';
    $yetAnotherParam = 'fum';
    return $this->vars('param1', 'anotherBigParam', 'yetAnotherParam');
}

private function vars() {
    $arr = array();
    foreach(func_get_args() as $arg) {
        $arr[$arg] = $$arg;
    }
    return $arr;
}

Is there some kind of drawback or risk from doing this? Does PHP or Symfony 2 already provide a better or cleaner way to achieve the same result?

Answer 1

You’re looking for compact.

public function indexAction()
{
    $param1 = 'fee';
    $anotherBigParam = 'foe';
    $yetAnotherParam = 'fum';
    return compact('param1', 'anotherBigParam', 'yetAnotherParam');
}