Question about the scope of functions

Greetings People, Now basically I am trying to set up an easy way to have key value pairs listed in a DB, and then be able to call the name of the key as a variable later in the code of the page and list the corresponding value in the DB. I am almost there. However I just need to figure out some scope issues with functions. I want to create variables with names on the fly through a function and have them last beyond the life of the function. However I do not want to have to declare each key/variable as a global variable in the function, will defeat the purpose of this. I have the following DB table

sao_key                         sao_value
app_past_enroll                         1
something                                       0
something_else                          1
yet                                             1

I have the following function function key_value ( $mysql ) {

        if ( $sao_row = $mysql -> fetchRow() )  {
                do {
                        ${"$sao_row[0]"} = $sao_row[1]; // Create a variablle to pull the radio variable name
                }       while ( $sao_row = $mysql -> fetchRow() );
        }

} I have the following code $sql = "SELECT sao_key, sao_value FROM staff_app_options

$sao = new MySQL ( $sql );      #       Create an object with the above query

key_value ( $sao ); echo 'Past Enrollment = ' . $app_past_enroll . NL; echo 'something = ' . $something . NL; echo 'something_else = ' . $something_else . NL; echo 'yet = ' . $yet . NL; So how do I get the script to read $app_past_enroll as a variable after it has been created by the function? Thanks for your help. Phillip