Why can't functions defined in Drupal blocks access globals?

Question

Scenario: I've defined a custom block in Drupal 6.20 under PHP 5.2.14. I've enabled PHP Code and I'm attempting to do something like this:

<?php
  $a = "success";

  function test() {
    global $a;

    print $a;
  }

  test();
?>

It prints nothing on my system, because I cannot seem to scope variable $a. I've also tried $GLOBALS['a'] to no avail. What gives? I feel like I'm going crazy.

Incidentally, using the global keyword in the outer scope will happily make drupal's globals available.

Answer 1

I'm not hugely familiar with Drupal but I'm guessing that the blocks are included inside some other function/method somewhere, so you're effectively dealing with a nested function, the include being in that outer function's local scope.

With that, it makes sense that $a = "success" can't be addressed from within the test() function.

If I'm right, it should work if you slap the global keyword on both scopes.