Getting at the variable name itself

Hi. I'm putting together a form that needs to have multiple pairs of both text inputs and checkboxes. On the submit page I need to be able to associate one with the other, and the variable names themselves have other identifying values embedded in their names. What I need to know is how do I access the variable name? Suppose I have a variable name like this: $method_valueA_valueB I intend to use the name itself as a string I can then explode to recover the embedded data. How do I operate on the variable name itself? TIA, Mike