any way of filtering $GLOBALS ?

Costin Trifan · 06-26-2009, 07:06 AM

I'm working on a big project I can't give you too much details about this right now, sorry, but I need a way of filtering the $GLOBALS variable.

The current architecture is a template based one so I need a way to extract only some of the global variables into some of my scripts.

Although it might seem easy I really have a big problem in getting it to work(maybe I have too much on my head right now and I obviously can't think clearly enough) so I need some help.

Description:

I have a php file, let's call it < main.php > which will hold some of the configuration settings and import some other scripts as well. Basically this would be the website's main file. It might look like this:

PHP Code:


		
			
<?php
    // main.php

// Globals

    $server = '';
    $db = '';
    $user = '';
    $password = '';
    $cs = array( 'server' => $server, 'db' => $db /* etc */);

    $sql = new MySqlWrapper();
    
    require 'lang.php';
    $lang = array(
         'welcome_msg' => 'Welcome to our website!'
        ,'home_page_title' => 'Welcome!'
    );

    require 'tpl.php';
    $tpl = new TemplateClass()

    require 'other_class.php';
    $class = new OtherClass();

    /* etc ... */
?>

Then I need to access some of these variables in other external pages, an example would be the < functions.php > file that will be included in some of the website's pages:

PHP Code:


		
			
<?php
    // functions.php

    $tpl->set_var('welcome_msg', $lang['welcome_msg']);
    $tpl->set_var('home_page_title', $lang['home_page_title']);

    // ^^ breaks the script. $tpl and $lang variables are not visible on this page
    // an alternative would be extract(GLOBALS); but that would bring on ALL globals here and I don't need them all
?>

And finally, an external page would look something like this:

Code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
    <title>{home_page_title}</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>{welcome_msg}</h1>
</body>
</html>

Now, my problem is accessing the global variables set in main.php file in the functions.php file, so I need to filter the $GLOBALS variable and I tried a few tricks but I couldn't get what I wanted.

The point of this is that the $GLOBALS variable is holding everything so I need to have the function exclude_globals() to filter them out,

PHP Code:


		
			
/**
* Filter $GLOBALS
*
* @param string|array $exclude    The variable or the array of variables to exclude
* @return array
*/
function exclude_globals( $exclude = NULL )
{
    # Will hold the $GLOBALS filtered
    $new = array();

    # the default list of variables to exclude from $GLOBALS
    $default_excludes = array('_POST', '_GET', '_COOKIE', '_FILES', '_SESSION', '_SERVER');

    if (is_array($exclude))
    {
        $excludes = array_merge($default_excludes, $exclude);
    }
    else {
        array_push($default_excludes, $exclude);
    }

    // TODO:
    //....



    return $new;
}

function that I would call in my functions.php file

PHP Code:


		
			
<?php
    // functions.php

    $globals = exclude_globals();
    extract($globals);

    $tpl->set_var('welcome_msg', $lang['welcome_msg']);
    $tpl->set_var('home_page_title', $lang['home_page_title']);
?>

and give me access to the global variables set in the other included files.

Can anyone help?