Webmaster in a Nutshell, Third Edition

Variables

In PHP, all variable names begin with a dollar sign ($). The $ is followed by an alphabetic character or an underscore, and optionally followed by a sequence of alphanumeric characters and underscores. There is no limit on the length of a variable name. Variable names in PHP are case-sensitive. Here are some examples:

$i
$counter
$first_name
$_TMP

In PHP, unlike in many other languages, you do not have to explicitly declare variables. PHP automatically declares a variable the first time a value is assigned to it. PHP variables are untyped; you can assign a value of any type to a variable.

PHP uses a symbol table to store the list of variable names and their values. There are two kinds of symbol tables in PHP: the global symbol table, which stores the list of global variables, and the function-local symbol table, which stores the set of variables available inside each function.

Dynamic Variables

Sometimes it is useful to set and use variables dynamically. Normally, you assign a variable like this:

$var = "hello";

Now let’s say you want a variable whose name is the value of the $var variable. You can do that like this:

$$var = "World";

PHP parses $$var by first dereferencing the innermost variable, meaning that $var becomes "hello". The expression that’s left is $"hello", which is just $hello. In other words, we have just created a new variable named hello and assigned it the value "World". You can nest dynamic variables to an infinite level in PHP, although once you ...