Convert Key => Value Arrays Into Standard Variables In PHP

Discussion

1. Hugo Magalhães

   Interesting effect, but it has the same effect of php’s extract function! In your example, you can do extract($user); and so call $first_name; ;)

   http://www.php.net/extract
2. david

   Good point Hugo. My post wasn’t detailed enough, or perhaps was over-simplified.

   With the loop, you can do special operations to the values. For example:

   foreach($_POST as $key=>$value)
   {
       $key = stripslashes($value);
   }
   

   …removes slashes.
• Charles Murray

  Thanks for this little simple snip of code. I have spent hours trying to get a query to read a
  WHERE id = "'.$_POST(var).'" Everything I tried would echo an array and then the value which the query just would say da~ha what??? After using this line above and the WHERE id = "'.$key.'" it work perfect as designed.Thank You for taking the time to make your post.
3. Peter Scarborough

   I have used this alot for both GET’s and POST’s, sure, they can create their own variables, who cares? If I use a variable, I always declare it after pulling from get or post, the variables that I use from post and get are also validated for correct values.

   Also, something I have found handy for dealing with case sensitivity for get variables, (since sometimes if someone posts it to say, ICQ for someone else to visit, ICQ will lowercase the whole string) is

   foreach($_GET as $k = $v) {
   $k = strtolower($k);
   \$$k = $v
   }
   

   then you can safely test to see if the get was set

   if(isset($variablenametotestfor)) {//begin execution}
   
4. david

   Thank you for the RegEx, Peter — that could prove very useful!
5. Peter Scarborough

   Sorry, there was an error in my regex syntax there, I learned regex with javascript, and just learning PHP regEx… I got the two confused when I wrote that

   The correct syntax for the above would be

   $acceptedGETS = "/\bvarname1\b|\bvarname2\b|\bvarname3\b|\betc\b/";
   foreach($_GET as $key => $value) {
   $key = strtolower($key);
   if (preg_match($acceptedGETS,$key)) $$key = $value;
   }
   

   the \b is required on both sides of each variable name to force exact words, without them qvarname1x34r would match.
6. David Moreen

   Hey is not on google so I was wondering what the ${ } does? I have never seen it before.
7. Droope

   Hi David,

   I think the brackets are just a way of delimiting the variable’s name from the rest of the string.

   Say you had variable $table_prefix,

   echo “table name: $table_prefix_users”; // would return “table name: “;
   echo “table name: ${table_prefix}_users”; // would return “table name: wp_users”;

   I am not sure about this :) I am most likely wrong.

   Cheers!
   Droope
8. Robert

   No, Droope is correct. Mostly.

   The ${ } does designate a string.

   But the purpose of this article is showing how to easily assign array variables to their key name. I know that sounds confusing, but its it.

   Example:

   $people[‘me’] = ‘robert’;
   $people[‘friend’] = ‘sam’;
   $people[‘girl’] = ‘bailey’;

   foreach($people as $key => $val) {
   // ${“me”} = ‘robert’

   ${$key} = $val; //or $$key = $val;
   }

   So that

   echo $me; //echo “robert”;
9. droope

   (great blog, btw)
10. Pascal

    As Hugo Magalhães said, I think this woud be a “better” solution…
    This way, nobody can modify or change your variables!

    extract($REQUEST, EXTR_PREFIX_ALL, "my_prefix");
11. Zync

    Thank you all very much for this, was exactly what I was looking for today. using Peter’s approach just whipped up a quick match string, just add your allowed variables to the array.

    $acceptedIncomingVars = array('id', 'name', 'code', 'cost', 'desc', 'mixtypeid', 'mixdetailid');
    
    $acceptedVars = "/";
    for($i = 0; $i  $value) {
        $key = strtolower($key);
    
        if (preg_match($acceptedVars,$key))
        {
            $$key = $value;
        }
    }
    
    echo $code;
    
12. Mark Petherbridge

    Would you be able to help me get this problem sorted.

    I have this

    $choices = array($_GET['choices']);
    

    which returns this:

    1,2,3,4,5

    I need to be able to go through them and not only the value of the items to the variable name but also as the value.

    So ideally I would like this:

    $choice1 = "1";
    $choice2 = "2";
    $choice3 = "3";
    etc..
    

    and for instance if

    $choices = array($_GET['choices']);
    

    returned :

    1,3,6,8

    I would like

    $choice1 = "1";
    $choice3 = "3";
    $choice6 = "6";
    $choice8 = "8";
    etc..
    

    Thank you.
13. Blat

    Nice, trick and thank to first comment about extract function :)
14. Sachin

    Dear,

    PHP 5 is already resolved the issue by creating a function called “extract()” which do the same thing as per by the above foreach loop.
15. Sachin

    use function extract() to get rid of all this stuff.
16. briedis

    This is super ugly/bad! Now people use IDE`s, and this makes life damn hard, because you can’t see what variables are defined etc.

    The only place where this could be used, is when you render a view, which uses global variables and output buffering.

    Otherwise, making all evil data that user submits as variables sounds veeeery uncool.