PHP Cookbook

5.4. Creating a Dynamic Variable Name

Problem

You want to construct a variable’s name dynamically. For example, you want to use variable names that match the field names from a database query.

Solution

Use PHP’s variable variable syntax by prepending a $ to a variable whose value is the variable name you want:

$animal = 'turtles';
$turtles = 103;
print $$animal;
103

Discussion

The previous example prints 103. Because $animal = 'turtles', $$animal is $turtles, which equals 103.

Using curly braces, you can construct more complicated expressions that indicate variable names:

$stooges = array('Moe','Larry','Curly');
$stooge_moe = 'Moses Horwitz';
$stooge_larry = 'Louis Feinberg';
$stooge_curly = 'Jerome Horwitz';

foreach ($stooges as $s) {
  print "$s's real name was ${'stooge_'.strtolower($s)}.\n";
}
Moe's real name was Moses Horwitz.
               Larry's real name was Louis Feinberg.
               Curly's real name was Jerome Horwitz.

PHP evaluates the expression between the curly braces and uses it as a variable name. That expression can even have function calls in it, such as strtolower( ).

Variable variables are also useful when iterating through similarly named variables. Say you are querying a database table that has fields named title_1, title_2, etc. If you want to check if a title matches any of those values, the easiest way is to loop through them like this:

for ($i = 1; $i <= $n; $i++) {
    $t = "title_$i";
    if ($title == $$t) { /* match */ }
}

Of course, it would be more straightforward to store these values ...