Re: [PHP] Is there a way to get a variable name as a string?
On Mon, July 18, 2005 8:24 pm, Ryan A said:
I didnt totally understand you q in the beginning (and still dont fully),
but
?php
$x = 5;
?
He wants a function that, if you put in $x, you get out 'x'
For *ANY* $variable.
There is no such function.
Usually the person asking it is doing something very newbie-ish, and very
wrong.
I know, cuz I was that person, many many years ago. :-)
I think what I needed that time was variable variables...
The other thing that tends to bring up this question is somebody trying to
write a custom error handler, not knowing about
http://php.net/trigger_error and friends. Though that only gets you the
line number and filename where the error occured, not a specific variable
name.
If for some reason one *NEEDS* to have names and variables and to know
what a variable's name is, you *probably* want to use an associative
array and use the keys as your names.
Hopefully this is helpful to the Original Poster, or somebody some day.
PS
It's true that your variable could/would/should appear in debug_backtrace,
but how would you pick it out from all the other variables that would
appear in your debug_backtrace?
For that matter, it's in $_GLOBALS, but how would you pick it out?
You could print out all variables that were equal to your variable, and
have a list of candidates...
?php
$x = 5;
$y = 3;
$z = 5;
while (list($k, $v) = each($GLOBALS)){
if ($v === $x) echo $k might be your variable...br /\n;
}
?
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Re: [PHP] Is there a way to get a variable name as a string?
Richard Lynch wrote:
[snip]
PS
It's true that your variable could/would/should appear in debug_backtrace,
but how would you pick it out from all the other variables that would
appear in your debug_backtrace?
For that matter, it's in $_GLOBALS, but how would you pick it out?
You could print out all variables that were equal to your variable, and
have a list of candidates...
?php
$x = 5;
$y = 3;
$z = 5;
while (list($k, $v) = each($GLOBALS)){
if ($v === $x) echo $k might be your variable...br /\n;
}
?
What I was thinking with debug_backtrace() is that you could get the
information for the function that called the function you want the
variable name for, *reducing* the likelyhood of duplicate values, but
admitedly not eliminating it.
You could also pass the name of the variable to the function:
someFunction($foo, $varName=){ print $varName; }
call it with - someFunction($bar, 'bar');
That would definately get you what you want, but again it would be messy
to look at.
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RE: [PHP] Is there a way to get a variable name as a string?
What I was thinking with debug_backtrace() is that you could get the
information for the function that called the function you want the
variable name for, *reducing* the likelyhood of duplicate values, but
admitedly not eliminating it.
You could also pass the name of the variable to the function:
someFunction($foo, $varName=){ print $varName; }
call it with - someFunction($bar, 'bar');
That would definately get you what you want, but again it
would be messy to look at.
Well if you called someFunction('bar');
Function someFunction($myVar)
{
global $$myVar;
echo the variable name is '$myVar' and has the value of .$$myVar;
}
But that relies on the global and is also a bit messy in a recursive
situation.
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RE: [PHP] Is there a way to get a variable name as a string?
He wants a function that, if you put in $x, you get out 'x'
For *ANY* $variable.
There is no such function.
Usually the person asking it is doing something very
newbie-ish, and very wrong.
Actually it's not either...
Since you can't easily debug when generating XML, as malformed XML will STB,
I have this function which dumps out an array and recursively sub arrays.
It would be very useful to dump out the name of the variable as part of
this, as a lot of text is on the screen with all the tags and such.
It always annoyed me about print_r() that it doesn't tell you the variable
name either, so you have to always prefix it with an echo/print just above
the print_r.
/**
* Print out an array in XML form (useful for debugging)
* @access public
* @paramstring $myArray the array to output in XML format
* @version 1.0
* @date 07/19/05
* @todo It would be nice if we could extract the array's variable
name and output that as an attribute
*/
function print_r_xml($myArray)
{
print xmltag('ARRAY', null, 1);
foreach($myArray as $k = $v)
{
if (is_array($v))
print_r_xml($v);
else
print xmltag($k,htmlspecialchars($v));
}
print xmltag('ARRAY', null, 2);
}
/**
* Add the starting, or ending, or both xml tags
*
* @return string xml formatted tags and data
* @paramstring $xmltag is the tag name to surround
* @parammixed $data data to output between the tags, if $data is
an array, it will be expanded as KEY=VALUE in the tag
* @paramint $tagType 1=start tag only, 2=end tag only, 3=default
* @version 1.2
* @date 06/14/05
*/
function xmltag($xmltag, $data, $tagType = 3)
{
// remove spaces and make uppercase
$xmltag = str_replace(' ','_', $xmltag );
//$xmltag = strtoupper( $xmltag );
$data = str_replace('','amp;', $data ); // fix data with
$data = str_replace('','lt;', $data );// fix data with
$data = str_replace('','gt;', $data );// fix data with
if ($tagType == 3)
{
if (isset($data))
{
if (is_array($data))
{
$tmp = ''.$xmltag;
if (is_array($data))
{
foreach($data as $key = $value)
$tmp .= '
'.$key.'='.$value.'';
}
$tmp .= /\r\n;
return $tmp;
}
else
return
''.$xmltag.''.$data.'/'.$xmltag.\r\n;
}
else
return ''.$xmltag. /\r\n;
}
if ($tagType == 1)
{
$tmp = ''.$xmltag;
if (is_array($data))
{
foreach($data as $key = $value)
$tmp .= ' '.$key.'='.$value.'';
}
$tmp .= \r\n;
return $tmp;
}
if ($tagType == 2) return '/'.$xmltag.\r\n;
}
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Re: [PHP] Is there a way to get a variable name as a string?
Rasmus Lerdorf wrote: Daevid Vincent wrote: Is there a way to get the name of a variable as a string? For example... Nope, not possible. Well ob_start(); echo '$var'; $contents = ob_get_contents(); ob_end_clean(); echo 'Variable Name is : '.substr($contents,strpos($contents,'$')+1); -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Is there a way to get a variable name as a string?
Maybe something like:
Function myname ($foo)
{
$return_value=the variable name passed in is .$foo;
return $return_value;
}
echo myname($bar);
Just a guess.
On 7/19/2005 3:27:57 AM, Daevid Vincent ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
Is there a way to get the name of a variable as a string? For example...
Function myname ($foo)
{
echo the variable name passed in is .realname($foo);
}
myname($bar);
I want to see printed out:
the variable name passed in is bar
^^^
Dig what
I'm trying to do?
And 'why?' you may ask am I trying to do this... Well, I am sick of always
putting an echo 'printing
out
bar:'; print_r($bar); all the time. I want
to make a wrapper function.
I also have written one for XML that would be nice to make a NAME='bar'
attribute...
/**
* Print out an array in XML form (useful for debugging)
* @access public
* @author Daevid Vincent [EMAIL PROTECTED]
* @since 4.0b4
* @version 1.0
* @date07/18/05
*/
function print_r_xml($myArray)
{
print xmltag('ARRAY', array('NAME'='myArray'), 1);
foreach($myArray as $k = $v)
{
if (is_array($v))
print_r_xml($v);
else
print xmltag($k,htmlspecialchars($v));
}
print xmltag('ARRAY', null, 2);
}
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P
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RE: [PHP] Is there a way to get a variable name as a string?
That won't work. Then I will get what the VALUE of $bar is set to. I want
the actual text bar. Basically everything after the $ -- ie. The NAME of
the VARIABLE, not it's contents.
The closest I've come so far is to do this.
Function myname($foo)
{
echo variable named $foo has the contents $$foo;
}
Myname('bar');
Which is pretty lame.
-Original Message-
From: Ryan A [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, July 18, 2005 6:57 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: php
Subject: Re: [PHP] Is there a way to get a variable name as a string?
Maybe something like:
Function myname ($foo)
{
$return_value=the variable name passed in is .$foo;
return $return_value;
}
echo myname($bar);
Just a guess.
On 7/19/2005 3:27:57 AM, Daevid Vincent ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
Is there a way to get the name of a variable as a string?
For example...
Function myname ($foo)
{
echo the variable name passed in is .realname($foo);
}
myname($bar);
I want to see printed out:
the variable name passed in is bar
^^^
Dig what
I'm trying to do?
And 'why?' you may ask am I trying to do this... Well, I am
sick of always
putting an echo 'printing
out
bar:'; print_r($bar); all the time. I want
to make a wrapper function.
I also have written one for XML that would be nice to make
a NAME='bar'
attribute...
/**
* Print out an array in XML form (useful for debugging)
* @access public
* @author Daevid Vincent [EMAIL PROTECTED]
* @since 4.0b4
* @version 1.0
* @date07/18/05
*/
function print_r_xml($myArray)
{
print xmltag('ARRAY', array('NAME'='myArray'), 1);
foreach($myArray as $k = $v)
{
if (is_array($v))
print_r_xml($v);
else
print xmltag($k,htmlspecialchars($v));
}
print xmltag('ARRAY', null, 2);
}
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RE: [PHP] Is there a way to get a variable name as a string?
hi Daevid
FWIW, I was trying to do the exact same thing a while back, and came to
the conclusion that it wasn't possible.
Rob
-Original Message-
From: Daevid Vincent [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, 19 July 2005 11:28 AM
To: php-general@lists.php.net
Subject: [PHP] Is there a way to get a variable name as a string?
Is there a way to get the name of a variable as a string? For
example...
Function myname ($foo)
{
echo the variable name passed in is .realname($foo);
}
myname($bar);
I want to see printed out:
the variable name passed in is bar
^^^
Dig what I'm trying to do?
And 'why?' you may ask am I trying to do this... Well, I am
sick of always
putting an echo 'printing out bar:'; print_r($bar); all the
time. I want
to make a wrapper function.
I also have written one for XML that would be nice to make a
NAME='bar'
attribute...
/**
* Print out an array in XML form (useful for debugging)
* @access public
* @author Daevid Vincent [EMAIL PROTECTED]
* @since 4.0b4
* @version1.0
* @date 07/18/05
*/
function print_r_xml($myArray)
{
print xmltag('ARRAY', array('NAME'='myArray'), 1);
foreach($myArray as $k = $v)
{
if (is_array($v))
print_r_xml($v);
else
print xmltag($k,htmlspecialchars($v));
}
print xmltag('ARRAY', null, 2);
}
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Re: [PHP] Is there a way to get a variable name as a string?
Daevid Vincent wrote: Is there a way to get the name of a variable as a string? For example... Nope, not possible. -Rasmus -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Is there a way to get a variable name as a string?
I didnt totally understand you q in the beginning (and still dont fully), but Is there a way to get the name of a variable as a string? For example... Nope, not possible. -Rasmus the man has spoken :-D -Ryan -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Is there a way to get a variable name as a string?
Rasmus Lerdorf wrote: Daevid Vincent wrote: Is there a way to get the name of a variable as a string? For example... Nope, not possible. -Rasmus Wouldn't the name of the variable show up in a var_dump()? It would be messy, but if it's there... -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Is there a way to get a variable name as a string?
Edward Vermillion wrote: Rasmus Lerdorf wrote: Daevid Vincent wrote: Is there a way to get the name of a variable as a string? For example... Nope, not possible. -Rasmus Wouldn't the name of the variable show up in a var_dump()? It would be messy, but if it's there... Actually I meant debug_backtrace()... Damn fingers... but it is still a question. :) -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
Re: [PHP] Is there a way to get a variable name as a string?
function named_print($var_name) {
return echo 'the variable named $var_name is set to ' . \$var_name;
}
eval(named_print($foo));
;-)
Tyler
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