Using Variable Variables in PHP
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Quite possibly one of PHP’s least utilized yet most valuable features is its support for Variable Variables. I stumbled across this concept just recently while working on a "Fiction Portal" project for a gaming website. Users of the service could submit their own fictional stories to a program which would then dump them into a MySQL table and populate that table’s columns with the characteristics of the story that the author provided. The way the table had been setup was such that each possible characteristic of a story was a separate column, and each story that held that characteristic would hold a value of 1 in the column whereas each story that didn’t would hold a value of 0 in it. Therefore, a sample story might look like this in the table:
Author Title Date Horror Comedy Adventure
Test "Test Story" 1/1/01 0 0 1
Everything went smoothly until I discovered that this
method of sorting made searching for stories with only certain criteria nearly impossible. Cue Variable Variables.
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