Ian's Random Bits of Information

In my recent experimentation of the new 5.3 anyonymous functions, I’ve come up with a custom iterator as a proof of concept:

function anonyIterator($array,$want_array = FALSE){
    $acount = count($array);
    $itcount = 0;
    return function() use ($acount,&$itcount,$array,$want_array) {
        $member = $itcount >= $acount
            ? FALSE
            : $array[$itcount];
        $itcount++;
        if ($member) {
            return $want_array === FALSE
		? $member
		: array($itcount,$member); 
        }
        else {
            return $member; // end of array
        }
    };
}

anonyIterator( array $array, boolean $want_array )

Example usage:

$array = array('cat','dog','frog','bird','zebra','lion');

$iterator = anonyIterator($array,TRUE);
while(list($i,$animal) = $iterator()) {
    echo "$i => $animal\n";
}

$iterator = anonyIterator($array);
while($animal = $iterator()) {
    echo "ANIMAL: $animal\n";
}

So, we have another use of anyonymous function in php. However, this is very impractical and I don’t see any use since for this as long as we have the ArrayIterator class.

~ by ityndall on October 29, 2010.

Posted in PHP