Comments on: PHP: What is More Powerful Than list()

By: Stoimen

Stoimen — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 18:29:16 +0000

@Does Not Matter – /2010/08/31/php-what-is-more-powerful-than-list-perhaps-extract/

By: Does Not Matter

Does Not Matter — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 13:25:08 +0000

extract()

By: Matthew

Matthew — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:08:18 +0000

There’s always pass-by-reference – that’s the traditional C-way to do things, anyway.

function getData($id, &$records, &$count) {...}

Disadvantage: Pass-by-reference isn’t clear in the calling code

By: Philip

Philip — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 09:39:33 +0000

There’s one problem to this though, list() takes only numerical arrays and not associative arrays. If you return an associative array then list won’t assign anything.

But then again, returning numerical arrays aren’t as.. maintainable as returning associative arrays.

Maybe you should just return associative arrays or maybe objects.

By: Stoimen

Stoimen — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:32:33 +0000

Actually this is a pretty good question! Well than this will fetch all the results only to return the count – which is stupid. Than you’ve to have two methods – one for the list and another for the count. What happens often in my practice is that in many cases I need both the list and the count, while only for few sets I need a separate count method. It all depends of the use case, of course.

By: Theo

Theo — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 12:26:54 +0000

This seems like a good use of the list() function! My only questions is how are you gonna fetch just the amount of records (for example when displaying: “There are 465 comments on this blog”) without actually fetching all the results?