On Tue, August 1, 2006 12:49 pm, bob pilly wrote: > Does anyone know if you can assign a new variable name based on the > contents of another variable in PHP? If so whats the syntax to do > this? You can and it's called Variable Variables in the documentation... 99% of the time, it's better to use an array. > I am parsing a text file that has tens of preset attributes and some > of these have hundreds of sub attributes. For example the text file > contains flight details, on every flight there can be up to 500 > passengers but there are generally only 50 so i dont want to have > declare 500 vars when i hardly ever use them. What i am trying to do > is count the amount of pasengers present and dynamically create the > variables based on this.$surname1,$surname2 etc... > > Im not sure whether this is a sane way to approach this problem or > not. Any advice or pointing to relevant documentation about either > syntax for this or ways of tackling this sort of problem (im sure it > must be a regular occurance in the coding world??) would be greatly > appreciated!! In this case, it's DEFINITELY better to use an array, as it is almost guaranteed that sooner or later you will have a flight with two people named "John Smith" on it. -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php