Re: Variable question

On Sat, 1 Oct 2011, Mike Mackintosh wrote:

Best bet would to toss this into either an object or array for simplification, otherwise that type of syntax would need the use of eval.

example: eval('echo $trivia_answer_'.$correct_answer.';');

You could do: $var = "trivia_answer_.$correct_answer"; echo $$var; But I agree that an array would be simpler.

best bet would be to.. $trivia_answer = array(); $trivia_answer[1] = 1000; $trivia_answer[2] = 1250; $trivia_answer[3] = 2500; $trivia_answer[4] = 5000; echo $trivia_answer[$correct_answer];

You can define this a bit more simply: $trivia_answer = array ( 1 => 1000, 2 => 1250, 3 => 2500, 4 => 5000 ); You can do it even more simply by just giving the values, but indexes wil start at 0: <?php $trivia_answer = array (1000, 1250, 2500, 5000); print_r ($trivia_answer); ?> Array (

    [0] => 1000
    [1] => 1250
    [2] => 2500
    [3] => 5000

) While manually defining an array like this is only slightly less tedius than using 4 numbered variables, it's a lot easier to do if you're getting data from somewhere else (e.g. a database of trivia questions). To use the original way proposed, you'd have to keep constructing variable names, which arrays avoid quite nicely. In my opinion, the only real usefulness for a syntax like $$var (above) is if you want to do something with a bunch of variables in one go. For example: foreach (array ("title", "artist", "album", "label") as $field) echo ucwords($field) . ': ' . $$field . '<BR>'; The above comes from a function which manages only a single record, so no real need to use an array. I could of course, e.g. record['title'] etc, but I don't see much could be gained unless I needed to be able to manage an entire record as a single unit. Geoff.