looping out globals

Anon

I'm trying to run a for loop that outputs global variables based on a count. I'm not coding the global properly in the loop... any help would be appreciated, here's the code:

if (isset($var1)){
for($i=1;$i<=$var1;$i++){
global $var2.$i;
}
}

it's blowing up on the global line... not sure what the syntax should be here.

Anon

I guess I'm confused do you want to print the global variables to the screen that are named $var2$i? Or do you want to import the global variables into your function?

to print out the globals using a loop you can use a couple of methods:

if (isset($var1)) {
for ($i = 1; $i <= $var1; $i++) {
$varname = "var2$i";
print $GLOBALS[$varname];
}
}

This method uses the GLOBALS array and builds the name of the variable var21, var22, var23, etc. before printing out each one.

if (isset($var1)) {
for ($i = 1; $i <= $var1; $i++) {
$varname "var2$i";
print $$varname;
}
}

This method uses variable variables to print out each item.

If you just want to have the variables accessable inside of a function then you can use the second example above but change the print line to "global $$varname;" or just add the line global $GLOBALS; to the beginning of your function and access all of your variables using that array.

Anon

so the second option worked with replacing the print line with global $$varname. Thanks, quick question:

What do the two $$ in front of varname do? I understand that it creates "variable variables" but what does that mean?

Anon

It basically says that you want to use the variable that has the name of what is stored in this variable.

$name = "Rob";
$varname = "name";
print $$varname;

outputs: Rob. It's very useful in situations like you had where you have a lot of variables that are named the same thing with an incrementing value. There are other uses but that seems to be the most common.

So what you did was store "var21" in the variable $varname, and then you said you wanted to access $var21 but you used $$varname.