creat vars from while loop?

Without flooding the page with my actual code, this is the simplest form of what I've been slamming my keyboard trying to figure out...

$p = 3;
$i = 1;
while($i != $p+1) {
	echo $i;
	$i = $i+1;
}

prints

thats fine, but what I need is for each # to create a '$link#' var that I can use outside the loop, ie;

$p = 3;
$i = 1;
while($i != $p+1) {
	echo $i;
    $link.$i = "index.php?#".$i;
	$i = $i+1;
}

which I want to print

and makes the vars

$link1 //which would equal "index.php?#1"
$link2 //which would equal "index.php?#2"
$link3 //which would equal "index.php?#3"

does that make scene?

Thank you in advanced,

I would strongly recommend using an array than individual scalar variables, but if your heart is set on it, you could do something like:

${"link".$i} = "index.php?#".$i;

But I'd really rather see you doing:

$link = array();
while(...)
{
   $link[$i] = "index.php?#".$i;
}

Thank you!

& I will definitely look into using an array instead,