Comments on: Things You Probably Didn’t Know About PHP – Part 2

By: foobar

foobar — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:32:52 +0000

the title of the article should be: “Things you probably didn’t know about PHP if you just started programming.”

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 17:56:41 +0000

@Utahcon: Omitting the closing ?> PHP tag is certainly neither bad practice nor non-standard. It’s required in the Zend Framework coding standards (http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/coding-standard.php-file-formatting.html) for instance. Doctrine and symfony (two other large projects) use the practice of omitting the closing tag as well just to name a few.

As for the rest of this article, you should be careful when you talk about things other people supposedly probably don’t know. I found all of these trivial and indeed most of them can be found in the manual.

By: SeanJA

SeanJA — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 21:55:45 +0000

Glad I am not the only one that thinks that #2 is a horrible practice…

By: Utahcon

Utahcon — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:47:05 +0000

#5 is a bad practice, and should be avoided. Since this is non-standard and inconstant usage of matching opening and closing tags, it should be avoided. It is always best to write code that is correct then to try to work around problems in case the work around becomes invalid in some future version. Correct code will always be correct. Code with a work around solution in it often breaks again.

By: Nandi

Nandi — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:44:04 +0000

#6 can be a security risk, because it overwrites your local variables. Never use it to unpack $_REQUEST, $_GET, $_POST.
On the other hand it is quite useful in templates:
function showTemplate($file, $params) {
inlude ‘tempaltepath/’ . $file;
}

in the template:
extract($params);

By: Jim O'Halloran

Jim O'Halloran — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:54:25 +0000

A neater way to return multiple values is to use an array, either an associative array as one of commenter’s above sggested, or a simple array as follows…

function foo() {
return array(‘bar’, ‘baz’);
}
list($var1, $var2) = foo();
echo ($var1); // bar;
echo($var2); // baz

Pass by reference parameters is something that a lot of languages support, but can be difficult to work with unless you know what’s happening. Given PHP’s great array support I;ve never had need to do it.

Jim.

By: ftsoc

ftsoc — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:17:04 +0000

actually at #2, you aren’t returning values but passing values by reference, which means you change the passed variables when u do any op. on it. its a huge difference.