Creating my own functions

Anon

This is probably a very easy question for most of you, but its confusing me (still a beginner)

I want to learn about functions so i am doing something simple here: I just want to display today's date and time on the screen using my own function. here is what i did

function datedisplay($todays_date, $todays_time)
{
// get current time and date

$todays_date = date ("m") . "-" . date("d") . "-" . date("Y");
$timestamp1 = date("G");
$timestamp2 = date("i");
$timestamp3 = date("s");
$todays_time = $timestamp1 . ":" . $timestamp2 . ":" . $timestamp3;
return $todays_date;
return $todays_time;
}

Then i call the function like this:

datedisplay($todays_date,$todays_time);

echo $todays_date;
echo "\n";
echo $todays_time;

and nothing prints to the screen...

thanks for any help

bryanzera

Just out of curiosity, why are you inputing variables that you immediately write over?

Bryan

Anon

like i said, im just learning how to do this, but thanks for your reply

codekid

Try this, you have to set a variable equal to the function.

function datedisplay()
{
// get current time and date

$today[0] = date (\"m\") . \"-\" . date(\"d\") . \"-\" . date(\"Y\");
$timestamp1 = date(\"G\");
$timestamp2 = date(\"i\");
$timestamp3 = date(\"s\");
$today[1] = $timestamp1 . \":\" . $timestamp2 . \":\" . $timestamp3;
return $today;
}

$today = datedisplay();

echo $today[0];
echo \"\n\";
echo $today[1];

Anon

A few pointers...

When you declare a function, the two variables in the parens are arguments that the function expects to get - if you're not passing in any parameters, you don't need to put them. So, in your case, since you don't need to pass any data to the function, you can just declare it like:

function myFunction() {
// stuff here
}

Second, a function can only have one return value. If you need to return two or more values, you have to put them in an array and return the array (an array is considered "one value").

So your function call should look something like this:

$myArray = myFunction();

$myArray will then contain the return value from myFunction() (which will be an array, right?). Then you can do whatever you want to $myArray.

Anon

Ok, im starting to get it, thanks for the help steve and chad