trying to use PHP extract() within a function

Question

Hi,

I have the two following files:

main.php

include("functions.php")  
__EXTRACT();  
echo $testvar;

functions.php

function __EXTRACT(){
extract($_POST, EXTR_SKIP);
}

However, having a form with a textbox called testvar I can't get the extract function to extract the data.. if I remove the function call and insert it the extract statement directly into main.php it works. The include is not a problem as other functions in it works. Any ideas?

Cheers

Answer 1

You can't do that: in your case extract() creates variables inside the __EXTRACT() function, when the function ends those variables are gone.

Anyway using extract() is very rarely a good idea.

Answer 2

You don't want to do this. This is basically just emulating register_globals inside of PHP. There's a reason it has been off by default for years, and is being removed in 6...