Is there a way to get the name of a variable? PHP - Reflection

Question

I know this is not exactly reflection, but kind of. I want to make a debug function that gets a variable and prints a var_dump and the variable name.

Of course, when

Answer 1

You can do it by converting the variable to a key/value set before passing it to the function.

function varName($theVar) {  
   $variableName = key($theVar);  
   $variableValue = $theVar[$variableName];  
   echo ('The name of the variable used in the function call was '.$variableName.'
');  
   echo ('The value of the variable used in the function call was '.$variableValue.'
');  
}
$myVar = 'abc';
varName(compact('myVar'));

Though I don't recommend creating a reference to a nameless variable, function varName(&$theVar) works too.

Since compact() takes the variable name as a string rather than the actual variable, iterating over a list of variable names should be easy.

As to why you would want to do this -- don't ask me but it seems like a lot of people ask the question so here's my solution.