Making global var from inside a function in PHP

Question

I am trying to define dynamically variables. I am using a function for this, but I don\'t know how to define the new var as global (because it never created before the function)

Answer 1

Regarding your edit: It makes your code less understandable.

Actually, there already exists a function that is doing this: extract().

while (($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result))){
    extract($row);
    // ...
}

extract() is even better, because it lets you specify what should happen if the variable already exists and/or lets you specify a prefix (so you don't overwrite already existing variables with that name). E.g. you could do:

extract($row, EXTR_PREFIX_ALL, 'db');

which would result in $db_first_name etc.

Surly, extract() is also doing some internal work here, but using built-in functions is always better than creating your own.

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Another possibility would be to use list():

while (($row = mysql_fetch_row($result))){
    list($first_name, $last_name, $address) = $row;
    // ...
}