Passing arrays between functions

Anon

Hi,

I wrote a bunch of spaghetti code, and I'm trying to clean it up now, so I'm moving alot of stuff to functions. No prob.

The application presents a multiple select list to the network admin, and he can select a bunch of boxes and hit 'submit'. That creates an array of machines. The first function in the program needs to take that array, run a check against all the boxes to see that they are all running snmp daemons, and if they're not, remove them from the array. Then, pass the (possibly smaller) array to another function.

This works in spaghetti code, but I wanna know the best way to approach this using functions.

Thanks!
/njcajun

amcgrath

do you mean like:

function chkSMTP($array_of_choices) {

while(list($k,$v) = @each($array_of_choices) {
// check to see if running smtp

// if it does

$good_array[] = $v;

}

return $good_array;
}

Anon

Well, here's some pseudo-code snipped from the spaghetti code I have (what can I tell you - it works!):

if(isset($submit))
{
$varcounter = count($boxen); //array from the form
$str = public; //default snmp community string.
for($i = 0; $i < $varcounter; $i++)
{
$infocheck = @snmpget("$boxen[$i]", "$str", "system.sysDescr.0");
if(! $infocheck)
{
print "SNMP doesn't appear to be running on $boxen[$i] \n";
unset($boxen[$i]);
}
flush();
}

The 'for' loop just does a quick test on each item in $boxen to see if SNMP is running.  If it's not, it removes that element from the array (hence the 'unset').

What I want to do now is make it so that it takes what is left (the boxes that *are* running SNMP), and passes that as an array to the function that actually goes out and does all the SNMP calls.

amcgrath

Well, thats kinda what i meant: you could write a function (say doSMTP()) and, at the end of the code above, just call it like so :

doSMTP($boxen);

Anon

The for loop could probably be replaced by an array_filter() function (see the docs) that does the test, prints the error and returns false in the event of non-SNMP (and true otherwise). Call it check_snmp(), say and have

$boxen=array_filter($boxen,'check_snmp');

with check_snmp() looking like

check_snmp($box)
{
global $str;
$infocheck = @snmpget("$box", "$str", "system.sysDescr.0");
if(! $infocheck)
{
print "SNMP doesn't appear to be running on $boxen[$i] \n";
}
return $infocheck;
}

Note that $str is declared global - otherwise it would be an (unset) local variable. Of course, $global has to be declared and have a value at the point where the function is defined.

Anon

wow - awesome - didn't know about that function!

I'll gnaw on that today - thanks a bunch!

Anon

damn! That worked like a charm - thanks!