Okay, I've found a possible solution for this, but for some reason, I can't make it work in my application. Apparently, if I have a variable which contains a name function, I could use
<?php echo $variable(); ?>
to output the function with the same name.
I'm using Codeigniter. It has a function in its Form helper to output a text field, which is
<?php form_input(); ?>
I have a variable
<?php $instance['taxon_field'] = 'form_input'; ?>
If I echo out this variable, I do get the needed value, 'form_input'. However, as soon as I try to echo
$instance['taxon_field']()
I get a warning:
Message: Illegal string offset 'taxon_field'
and a fatal error:
Call to undefined function p()
I am really clueless here, because echoing only the variable gives 'form_input', but echoing $variable() only gives 'p'.
Where am I doing wrong?
The actual problem here is that $instance
is not an array, but a string. Judging from the error message, it's a string whose value starts with p
.
The syntax $var[$key]
is used not only to access array elements but also to index into strings, where $var[0]
would be the first character (actually, byte) of $var
etc. If $instance
is a string and you write $instance['taxon_field']
then PHP will try to convert 'taxon_field'
to an integer in order to index into the string. This results in 0
as per the usual conversion rules , so the whole expression gets you the first letter of the string.
Assuming that the string starts with p
it's then pretty obvious why it tries to call a function with that name.
call_user_func($instance['taxon_field']);
The confusion created is actually my own fault because I failed to provide some aditional information which I thought was not important, but turned out to be crutial. My $instance[] array is actually a result of a foreach loop (two of them, to be precise) and is a part of a bigger multidimensional array. The actual code is more complicated, but I'll try to represent it right:
<?php
$bigger_array = array(
0 => array(
'field_one' => 'value_one',
'field_two' => 'value_two',
'field_three' => 'new_function'
),
1 => array(
'field_one' => 'new_value_one',
'field_two' => 'new_value_two',
'field_three' => 'echo'
)
);
function new_function()
{
echo 'New function called.';
}
foreach($bigger_array as $instance)
{
$name = $instance['field_three'];
$name('Hello World!');
}
?>
This will output the following:
New function called. Fatal error: Call to undefined function echo() in /opt/lampp/htdocs/bla.php on line 69
In other words, the newly defined function works fine, but the built-in 'echo' doesn't.
This is actually not my original problem, this is something that I've encountered while trying to debug the initial issue. And the original problem is that creating a function from a single-dimensional array works okay. whereas creating a function from a multi-dimensional array within a foreach loop transforms the array into a string with the value of its last member.
Now, I'm still not really able to fully answer my question, but I think information I'm giving could lead to a solution. In the simplified example that I gave here, why am I getting the message that echo() function is not defined, while the new function works fine?
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