Function arguements

thom

I have an Array that contains arguements to a function. What I need to is to pass the elements of the Array to a function. An example of this would look like the following:

$args = Array('one','two','three');
foo($args[0],$args[1],$args[2]); // this would equal to foo('one','two','three');

BUT, my problem is that I don't know how many elements the array may contain, and I want to pass all of them to the function. Any ideas ... anyone?

Tekime

foo($args);

thom

no ... by doing that you're only passing one arguement to the function, that arguement being an Array. I want to pass count($args) many arguements to the function.

Tekime

Yup, although it seemed to be an easier means to the same ends. I don't know what your function looks like though. You can use func_num_args() to get the number of arguments passed to a function, if that helps you any. Not sure how to pass a variable number of arguments automatically.

Good luck 🙂

Bunkermaster

your function sounds scary...

optional args are declared this way
function neverCodeMeLikeThat( $arg1, $arg2 = '-1' , $arg3 = '0' ){
}

...

Tekime

Well it sounds like thom is trying to pass an unknown number of array values; if that's the case he's better off using get_args since he won't have to define very possible argument in the function declaration (which could be endless since he doesn't know the array height).

Anyway, you think that's ugly, here's someof the ugliest code I've ever written:

<?php

// Dump all passed args
function test() {
     $numargs = func_num_args();
     for($index=0; $index<$numargs; $index++) {
        echo func_get_arg ($index);
     }
}

// This is your unknown array
$mArray = array('red', 'green', 'blue', 'purple' ,'yellow', 'orange', 'clear');

// This converts the array values to string we can evaluate

$callFunc = "test(";
$size = sizeof($mArray) - 1;

for($index=0; $index<=$size; $index++) { 
    if($index < $size) {    

        $callFunc .= '"' . $mArray[$index] . '",';
    } else {
        $callFunc .=  '"' . $mArray[$index] . '");';
    }
}  

eval($callFunc); 

?>

This bit of evil takes an array of unknown length ($mArray), parses each value to a string which takes the form of a function call, including the values of each array member as an argument.

Then eval() the string...

And the test function just shows that each argument can be pulled off the stack without knowing the limit.

Man I hope you never use that code though :p

thom

exacly! eval() was the keyword!

thanks for the help,
thom

ps. rest assure, I'll not use that code 🆒