note 25332 deleted from language.variables.scope by nlopess

Note Submitter: morthanpurpl@yahoo.com ---- I have spent most of a day trying to figure out this business of globally scoped variables and functions. At long last I have figured out what is not made clear in the hundreds of pieces of documentation, notes, mail & forum messages, etc. What it amounts to is this: You MUST use a variable in a global context FIRST, even if all you do is initialize it, as in: $a = ''; Then: function dumdum() { global $a; $a = "iam"; } ... will place the value "iam" in the GLOBAL variable $a. It appears (and this is day 2 of PHP for me, so I could be grossly wrong) that without the $a = '' before the function call, the operation of global within a function is actually implemented as: "Use a global variable if there is one, otherwise ignore the global declaration and create/use a function-local variable." This also appears true even if the infamous "register_globals" is "On". The reason this may be confusing is the oft-repeated "PHP does not require you to declare variables before using them." Except, it seems, in this case.