Sort of a use for variable-variables!

Variable-variables, as I call them, are variables whose names are constructed from other variables. In PHP, they look like this:

<?php

$var1 = 'newvar';

$$var1 = 'variable-variable';

echo "$newvarn";

?>

Of course, this will echo "variable-variable". When I construct $$var1, it creates a variable called $newvar in the namespace, because it's using the value of $var1 for the name of this new variable.

In general, variable-variables aren't that useful. There are special cases but as a programmer you shouldn't find yourself using them very often.

Anyway, I thought up a fun case. So I'm going to be making a neat little DateManager class in the near future (because I hate dealing with dates), and I thought: "It'd be kind of nice if a user could do $dm->October to get the number 10, or $dm->m10 to get the string 'October'." This is easily solved with variable-variables: when you generate the list of months like so:

$months = array();

for ($m = 1; $m >= 12; $m++) {

  $months[$m] = date("F", mktime(0,0,0,$m+1,0,0));

}

You could split up the date part and assign it to a class variable with $this.

...

  $month_name = date(...);

  $this->$month_name = $m;

  $this->{'m'.$m} = $month_name;

...

Just a neat PHP trick I thought I'd share. When I finish the DateManager class I'll put it up on GitHub and give the link.

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Posted on 2009-10-19 by Jach

Tags: php, programming

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