Returning Multiple Values with a Function in PHP

As I'm coding I try to package my code in useful pieces that make it easy to understand what is going on in my programs. What that means in practice is using functions to do the packaging. Functions are just actions that can include multiple statements and do multiple things. If variables are the nouns of your program then a function is the verb. Functions are sometimes also referred to as methods.

Anyways, one action you might want a function to do is return a value. To do this you may have a function fetch results from a database or perform some equation base on a value being passed to the function. For example I could make a function that adds 10 to a value.

function addTen($number) {
$sum = $number + 10;
return $sum;
}
echo addTen(5);

In the above example I have a function called addTen that is passed a number and returns that number with 10 added to it. In order to have the code spit out the value you just echo out the function. Pretty simple

Returning Multiple Values

A function returning one variable is easy. Functions are meant to return a variable. Having a function return multiple variables is a little more complicated. The way it is achieved is with an array.

Arrays are variables with multiple values. An example of an array might be a variable called $color. There are many colors, so it would make sense to create our variable $color using an array. To make an array you declare the variable and specify the values like so: $color = array(red,blue,green,black); You access the values by specifying the key (Pointing at which value you want). To access red you would: echo $color[0]; Arrays start with 0 as the first value. Another type of array are associative arrays. These types of arrays have user defined keys instead of the default numbered keys. For example I could have and array of the traits of a person: $person = array( 'name' => 'Jason', 'address' => '123 Main St.', 'age' => '25'); To access Jason's address you would echo $person['address'];

So that brings us to the main objective here: Creating a function that returns multiple values.

// This is handy if you had a function that could do a database call and return a bunch of values. You could then access those values as an array

function animals() {
$dog = "odie";
$cat = "garfield";
$rabbit = "bugs";
$donkey = "eeyore";

$animals = array (
dog => $dog,
cat => $cat,
rabbit => $rabbit,
donkey => $donkey
);

return $animals;
}
// set variable equal to the function returning the array

$animals = animals();

//access the values through the keys of the array

echo $animals['dog'];
echo "
";
echo $animals['cat'];
echo "
";

This method has all sorts of uses. This is extremely useful when dealing with a database and you want to consolidate your fetch operations in a function but want to separate your styling code from the function.

Hope you find this useful!