using variable variables and different methods of declaring them

I am trying to state some variables. I want to state a variable variable/ ie one part of the variable name is constant and the other part is different. The constant part of the variable name is $newsItem and the other part of the variable name has to be the number of the loop ($ie) Here is my code: for ($i = 1; $i < $numItems; $i++) { $iCurr = "$i.txt"; if (!$text=fopen("$iCurr", "r")) echo ("file $iCurr does not exist".BR); } elseif ($numItems) { $newsItem = fread($text, 100); echo (NL); echo ("-- $newsItem -------- This was printed from $iCurr (\$iCurr)".BR); $newsItem.$i = "$newsItem"; ######### THIS IS THE PART WHERE I WANT TO DO VAR VARS, BUT I KNOW THAT THIS SYNTAX IS WRONG ########## } elseif ($numItems) { // do nothing yet } // echo ("this is #$i var".BR); // Prints the number of $numItems } Whats happening here is I have loop that is controlled by $numItems this is going to be 5. It loops until i = 5. It reads the info in from seperate text files, '1.txt', '2.txt', '3.txt', '4.txt', '5.txt', etc. I then want to set the variable $newsItem4 ($newsItem-4 is then determined by the value of $i which increments each loop) to be $newsItem. Can anyone help. Thanks. Scott.