Hidden Features of PHP? [closed]

Answer 1

One not so well known feature of PHP is extract(), a function that unpacks an associative array into the local namespace. This probably exists for the autoglobal abormination but is very useful for templating:

function render_template($template_name, $context, $as_string=false)
{
    extract($context);
    if ($as_string)
        ob_start();
    include TEMPLATE_DIR . '/' . $template_name;
    if ($as_string)
        return ob_get_clean();
}

Now you can use render_template('index.html', array('foo' => 'bar')) and only $foo with the value "bar" appears in the template.