How to simulate perl's wantarray in PHP?

[Anon]

I need to know if a function in PHP is required to return a value or not.
I want to make a funtion that will return a string if it is called as an expression like this :

$str = myfunction(); //$str will contains a string

But if it is called with no requirement to return values, it will print the output to STDOUT (browser)

myfunctions(); //the result is sent to browser

How to code the checking portion in myfunction?

function myfunction() {
if (?????????)
print "hello";
else
return "hello";
}

In perl, I could do that with "wantarray" function.

[Anon]

you could simply feed the function an argument to control it's ouput:

<?
function myfunction ($arg) {
if ($arg == 'echo') {echo 'hello';}
if ($arg == 'return') {return 'hello';}
}

myfunction ('echo'); // echos hello
$var = myfunction ('return'); // $var now equals hello
?>

[Anon]

yes, of course,
but I want myfunction to be a lot smarter than that.
I'd rather making two different functions (like printword() and returnword()) than having to pass argument each time I call a function.

[Anon]

Wantarray returns TRUE if the enclosing sub-routine was called in a list context. I don't see how you are trying to emulate that behavior. You could always pass an extra argument to your routines which denotes whether results are printed to STDIN or a returned.

function Example ($data,$retType) {

if($retType){
return $data;
} else {
print $data;
}

}

Example("hello",1); // returns data
Example("hello",0); // prints data

[Anon]

Sorry, STDOUT 🙂