PHP 5.4.17 alternative for the “… operator”

Question

I was wondering if someone may know an alternative to the PHP 5.6.x and higher ... operator (or splat operator I believe its called).

What i'm currently doing in my PHP 7 version is:

$this->callAction(
...explode('@', $this->routes["authControllers"][$this->routes["uri"][$uri]])
);

The callAction() function takes 2 parameters callAction($controller, $action) but now I need to downgrade the code to PHP 5.4.17.

Answer 1

Though the splat operator ... is similar to call_user_func_array():

call_user_func_array(array($this,'callAction'),
                     explode('@', $this->routes["authControllers"][$this->routes["uri"][$uri]]));

I think it would make more sense to pass the required arguments:

list($controller, $action) = explode('@', $this->routes["authControllers"][$this->routes["uri"][$uri]]);
$this->callAction($controller, $action);

Answer 2

i think the equivalent PHP5 code would be call_user_func_array(array($this,'callAction'),(explode('@', $this->routes["authControllers"][$this->routes["uri"][$uri]])));

edit: but if the callAction always takes exactly 2 arguments, you could just do

$args=explode('@',$this->routes["authControllers"][$this->routes["uri"][$uri]]));
$this->callAction($args[0],$args[1]);

but if thats the case, idk why the php7 code bothers with the ... at all, i thought that was for variable number of arguments? (like call_user_func_array is for. for an example of a function that takes a variable number of arguments, see var_dump)